  To provide a practitioner's introduction to the study of the nuclear pasta,
this article presents a brief review of the evolution of the methods used to
study nucleon dynamics. This is followed with a more complete description of
the extension of classical molecular dynamics (CMD) to infinite systems. The
different techniques used to characterize the nuclear structure, such as
cluster recognition algorithms, radial correlation functions and the Minkowski
functionals are presented. We reach full functionality of the extended CMD when
the Coulomb interaction is introduced through two common methodologies and its
effect on the structure is presented. We close the article with some final
remarks.
