Software
R and RStudio
- R - Windows or Mac
- RStudio - Download Windows or Mac version from here
If using Windows, you also need to download and install these:
R Packages
Once R is installed, install the following R packages.
install.packages(c('devtools', 'tidyverse', 'psych', 'reshape2',
'blogdown', 'bookdown', 'shiny', 'markdown', 'knitr',
'foreign',
'openintro', 'OIdata', 'fivethirdyeight'))
devtools::install_github('jbryer/likert')
devtools::install_github("jbryer/DATA606")
LaTeX
LaTeX is a typesetting language for preparing documents. Documents are written in plain text files. Formatting the document is done using specific markup. If you have used HTML, the framework is similar however instead of using <TAG></TAG> syntax, LaTeX uses \TAG{} format. We will primarily use Markdown, and its extension R Markdown for preparing documents in this class. However, when preparing PDF documents, the Markdown will first be converted to LaTeX before creating the PDF file. As such, a LaTeX converter is necessary. There are LaTeX installers for Windows (MiKTeX) and Mac (BasicTeX). Alternatively, the tinytex R package provides an easier way of installing LaTeX directly from within R:
install.packages('tinytex')
tinytex::install_tinytex()
Source Control
All course materials will be made available on Github which provides an implementation of the git open source version control system. RStudio supports git directly, but I recommend downloading Sourcetree. This is a free desktop client that provides an easier interface for working with Github. You will also need to create an account on Github.
For more information, Jenny Bryan’s Happy Git and Github for the useR is a free online book covering the important features of source control for R users.