ROOT Tutorial

Once a year, at Nevis, I give an all-day hands-on tutorial on ROOT to the REU students (and anyone else at Nevis who's interested). I assume that these students have little or no experience with ROOT, UNIX, Python, C++, histograms, or statistics. The goal is to enable them to make histograms from ntuples that other people create for them.

You can use the tutorial if you're not at Nevis. The tutorial contains instructions for downloading files to your computer.

The 2026 class (27-May-2026)

Here's the hands-on ROOT tutorial for 2026:

• The tutorial itself in web-page format.
• The same pages in PDF format.
• When the tutorial mentions additional files, you can get them here.

Here are the PDF files of slides I prepared for the 2026 lectures, most of which are based on the appendices within the tutorial. This year I gave lectures on two of the topics in the appendices:

• Nevis particle-physics systems
• The purpose of ROOT
• The statistics slang used by physicists.
• An overview of batch processing (or "Why do we use condor?")
• A few tips on speeding up your programs.
• The git version control system.

The 2025 class (28-May-2025)

Here's the hands-on ROOT tutorial for 2025:

• The tutorial itself in web-page format.
• The same pages in PDF format.
• When the tutorial mentions additional files, you can get them here.

Here are the PDF files of slides I prepared for the 2025 lectures, most of which are based on the appendices within the tutorial. This year I gave lectures on two of the topics in the appendices:

• Nevis particle-physics systems
• The purpose of ROOT
• The statistics slang used by physicists.
• An overview of batch processing (or "Why do we use condor?")
• A few tips on speeding up your programs.
• The git version control system.

The major additions from last year:

• making x-y plots in ROOT;
• a section on ROOT Friends to go along with the section on Chains;
• a new appendix on git.

The 2024 class (29-May-2024)

Here's the hands-on ROOT tutorial for 2024:

• The tutorial itself in web-page format.
• The same pages in PDF format.
• When the tutorial mentions additional files, you can get them here.

Here are the PDF files of slides I displayed during lectures on the following topics:

• Nevis particle-physics systems
• The purpose of ROOT
• The statistics slang used by physicists.
• An overview of batch processing (or "Why do we use condor?")
• A few tips on speeding up your programs.

Only minor changes from last year: There's new material on using TTreeReader in the C++ section, and a new appendix on ROOT dictionaries.

Archives

All of the previous editions of the ROOT tutorial and related presentations are in the archives.