Software, hardware, and accounts

Checklist

  • R 4.1 or higher
  • RStudio
  • Package manager for your OS
  • git and GitKraken
  • pandoc or Quarto
  • GitHub account

Hardware

  • Many sessions will involve writing code in class
  • Tablets (iPad, Surface) will only work if you’re using them to access a cloud computing setup
  • I recommend that your machine have at least
    • 200 GB free hard drive space
    • 8 GB RAM
    • Intel i5 processor
    • Operating system capable of running R 4.1 or higher
      • Mac: 10.13 (High Sierra) or more recent
      • Windows: See here
      • If you’re running Linux I’m going to assume you can figure this out yourself

Accessibility

I chose the tools and platforms for this course in part because they’re industry-standard. If you pursue a career as a data scientist in industry, you’ll be expected to use GitHub (or something similar) on a daily basis. And RStudio is by far the most commonly used IDE (“integrated development environment”) for R.

However, like many other technologies, they were originally developed using ableist assumptions about “normal” computer users. In response to criticism, the developers of these systems and tools have gone back and made their technologies more accessible. But there may still be barriers to accessibility that I have not anticipated.

If you encounter a barrier to participating in this course — even a small inconvenience — please let me know. Similarly, if you have ideas for making the course more accessible, please share them with me.

R and RStudio

R and RStudio


  • R is updated regularly, and there’s a breaking change about once per year
  • RStudio also regularly gets new features, though breaking changes are less frequent
  • For consistency in class, I encourage you to use the latest version of both R and RStudio
  • I use rig to switch between different versions of R

Compilers

Sometimes you’ll need to compile a package in order to install it.

  • Mac
    • In a terminal, simply enter
    sudo xcode-select --install
    You’ll need to enter an administrator password
  • Windows
  • Linux
    • I’m pretty sure Linux and the like come with the necessary compilers

OS

  • All of the tools we’ll use are available on all major OSes
  • I have much less experience debugging Windows and Linux, but will do what I can

Package manager

  • Software to facilitate installing, upgrading, and removing other software
  • Highly recommended for installing git, pandoc, and some other tools we’ll use later
  • Mac OS: Homebrew or MacPorts
  • Windows: Chocolatey
    • I guess there are others, but this is what previous students have recommended
  • Either: Anaconda is popular among Python folks, and works as a package manager for multiple OSes
    • But sometimes packages aren’t up to date
    • Ex: Most recent version of R appears to be 3.6.0, released April 2019

Once your package manager is ready to go, install git and pandoc. (You might consider Quarto, which includes pandoc and possibly also LaTeX.)

  • Mac, Homebrew:

    brew install git
brew install pandoc

  • Windows, Chocolatey:

    • Needs to be in elevated/administrator mode
    • If prompted, Yes to running additional scripts
    choco install git
choco install pandoc

LaTeX

  • We don’t use it directly, but it turns Rmarkdown into PDFs

  • If you have no idea what that meant, don’t worry about it for now

  • I recommend the TinyTeX distribution, which you can install via R:

    install.packages('tinytex')
tinytex::install_tinytex()

GitHub and GitKraken

  • You’ll need
  • After you have access to the Student Developer Pack, activate GitHub integration in GitKraken. This should enable all of GitKraken’s Pro features.