You are required to register for a free individual account at GitHub. You are encouraged to apply for student developer pack. They are free for students and awesome collection of tools and packages.
I will need your email id’s you used for registration in GitHub to invite you to accept assignments. You will have your own private repositories where you’ll deposit (“push” in git language) your classwork and homework for this course. Discussion among us for this course will be done at the Discussion page in GitHub. You may also raise questions and issues by clicking “New issue” tab in this page.
Don’t freak out if there are problems. That’s pretty common when you are getting introduced to something new. Come to office hours, use our Discussion page or ask for help.
You can install R from its source page here. I would suggest installing the precompiled binary for your OS.
Install RStudio desktop version from here. You need to install R first before installing RStudio for it to work.
RStudio comes with a text editor, so there is no need to install a separate stand-alone editor.
Even if you have a already existing installation of RStudio, I would highly recommend that you reinstall and upgrade to the most recent version. It is very easy to re-install RStudio which is evolving rapidly.
Once you installed RStudio, when you open it, you should see a screen something like this. Of course, all the panes in your session will be empty.
To check if everything is installed properly, type in x <- 4 + 5 in your pane labelled Console. If you check the value of x by typing x in the console followed by a return, you should see the value 9 printed out.
If you upgrade R, you will need to update any packages you have installed. The following command in RStudio console (plus some extra-arguments perhaps), will update already installed packages:
update.packages(ask = FALSE, checkBuilt = TRUE)
Use the following template:
install.packages("package_name",dependencies = TRUE)
where “package_name” is the name of the package you want to install. For instance, if you want to install the package tidyverse, type
install.packages("tidyverse",dependencies = TRUE)
in the console and you should have it.
RStudio support: https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us
Getting help with R: https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200717153-Getting-Help-with-R
R Instalation and admin: https://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-admin.html
Terminal is your friend. Getting comfortable using the terminal will go a long way in your career.
We will be using Git extensively in the class and learning to access git through your terminal is necessary. If you are using a Mac, your terminal should be in Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal
Here is a good tutorial for Git: Github Tutorial For Beginners
Here is another one (in windows): Learn Git in 20 Minutes
There are several good ones - just type ‘git tutorial’ in YouTube and find the one which you really like.
Working with RStudio, Git and Github - we will demo this in the class, but here is an excellent resource if you want to prepare ahead.
A note on git installation on windows: If you are using a Windows laptop and your RStudio cannot link to your git account, please [download this git-bash] (https://git-for-windows.github.io/) and install it (with default settings).
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