Provide VScode instructions as an alternative getting started method.

[jessesoliman]

I have familiarity with VScode, but not with using Jupyter Notebook. I think this may be the case for many OSU students. In my brief experience running jupyter notebook through the browser is a good deal slower with a less intuitive interface. I would like to put together a tutorial for using VScode and running the first jupyter notebook on it (0_scarr_start_here_V2.ipynb) for true beginners like me.

Please let me know if there's any feedback you would like to provide for this suggestion (even if it is that this isn't a good enough idea).
Thank you!

[decryptofy]

Thank you for looking into SCARR. I do not oppose having a beginner's guide (something that is needed) but it would be great to keep it unrelated to the choice of IDE. VScode has a Jupyter notebook extension readily available:
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-toolsai.jupyter

Others might prefer PyCharm (free EDU license available), or yet another option. For now, I will keep this issue open to encourage more feedback about a potential beginner's guide.

[jessesoliman]

Thank you for your comment and feedback. I would really like to work on a beginner guide, but in thinking about how to put something together that would be worthy, I'm realizing that the topic of side-channel analysis is something I'm unfamiliar with. Do you have some reading material I can look at to familiarize myself (research papers, articles, etc...) while I brainstorm how I can contribute. Thank you for your time.

[decryptofy]

As a first step, we should determine the targeted audience of a beginner guide. Undergraduate-level student of CS or ECE? What is the knowledge we assume these students to have?

The research community thinks that, e.g., this is an introduction to side-channel analysis:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13389-011-0006-y
"Introduction to differential power analysis" by Paul Kocher et al.

which probably is not suitable for the undergraduate-level CS or ECE. A foundational textbook on this topic is: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-38162-6