This is a hands-on bioinformatics workshop. All participants should bring their own laptop which will be used as a terminal during the workshop. The first day will cover working with UNIX with a focus on how to navigate and manipulate files and folders and the concept of piping data between useful UNIX tools. After familiarizing ourselves with UNIX we will move on to Biopieces which are a collection of bioinformatics tools that can be pieced together in a very easy and flexible manner to perform both simple and complex tasks. We will use Biopieces to manipulate tabular data and sequence data including sequence cleaning and searching along with gene finding and phylogeny. Finally, we will learn QIIME for the purpose of characterizing microbial communities.