Recommendations for Computer Science Courses Applied to Environmental Biology, Zoology, or Entomology

I have been in software for a loooong time but I have no real background in this field at all. Take what I say with a grain of salt and someone please correct me if I'm wrong.

My wife is finishing her last year of a biology undergrad and thinking to go into data analytics/science. The general sense that I'm getting from the coursera courses and data science books she has been reading has been that, basically, any data science resource would be good enough. Having the foundational knowledge for whatever your field is helps but really it doesn't seem to matter that much when you get down to it.. Finance, animal populations, etc.. It's all numbers and you're just counting different things at the end of the day.

Things to learn (possibly in order of importance) seem to be..

Either R or Python.

If you're going with R, you should work with libraries like shiny, ggplot2, and tidyverse.

If Python, check out pandas and numpy.

Git.

Some version of SQL (SQLite is a good starting point).

Excel (but Google Sheets is good enough to start with).

The thing I tend to do when learning a language is to go through a quick and dirty intro book. I really like the "Learn X the hard way" style books.. The python one is great. I finish (maybe) 50% of whatever book I'm using and then I move on. I find a project to work on using that language as soon as possible. You're going to learn more doing this than you will reading a book.

Remember, you don't need to be an expert.. Get the gist and start playing around. You'll figure out the hard stuff when you get to a problem that requires it. A solid 80% of writing code is just googling for how to do stuff you either forgot or never learned in the first place.

Do NOT spend 8 hours watching "Everything you need to learn python" videos. You will never learn anything doing that.

Books like Learn Python The Hard Way give you a breakdown of the basic tools you have in your toolbox.. Strings, integers, lists, dictionaries, variables, etc. The way you solve a problem with code is by combining those tools. Start by combining two of them. Then three. Then five. Then ten. Once you get that flow in your head, you can solve damn near any problem and pick up new languages really quickly.

I don't think I can answer your exact question, but likely you'd want to learn Matlab and Python because of how frequently they're used to analyze and process data in the research sciences. My daughter is in a geophysics PhD program and pretty much lives in those two.