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7 Pre-course tasks

These are a set of common tasks that participants have to do for each of the r-cubed courses (for instance, introductory and intermediate).

7.1 How to read the course website

We will explain this a bit during the course, but read this to start learning how the website is structured and how to read certain things. Specifically, there are a few “syntax” type formatting of the text in this website to be aware of:

Folder names always end with a /, for example data/ means the data folder.
R variables are always shown as is. For instance, for the code x <- 10, x is a variable because it was assigned with 10.
Functions always end with (), for instance mean() or read_csv().
Sometimes functions have their package name appended with :: to indicate to run the code from the specific package, since we likely haven’t loaded the package with library(). For instance, to install packages from GitHub using the pak package we use pak::pkg_install("user/packagename"). You’ll learn about this more later.
Reading tasks always start with a statement “Reading task” and are enclosed in a “callout block”. Read within this block. We will usually go over the section again to reinforce the concepts and address any questions.

7.2 Installing the latest programs

The first thing to do is to install these programs. You may already have some of them installed and if you do, please make sure that they are at least the minimum versions listed below. If not, you will need to update them.

R: Any version above 4.1.2. If you have used R before, you can confirm the version by running R.version.string in the Console.
RStudio: Any version above v2021.09.0+351. If you have installed it before, check the current version by going to the menu Help -> About RStudio.
Git: Select the “Click here for download” link. Git is used throughout many sessions in the courses. When installing, it will ask for a selecting a “Text Editor” and while we won’t be using this in the course, Git needs to know this information so choose Notepad.
Rtools: Version that says “R-release”. Rtools is needed in order to build some R packages. For some computers, installing Rtools can take some time.

R: Any version above 4.1.2. If you have used R before, you can confirm the version by running R.version.string in the Console. If you use Homebrew, installing R is as easy as opening a Terminal and running:
```
brew install r
```
RStudio: Any version above v2021.09.0+351. If you have installed it before, check the current version by going to the menu Help -> About RStudio. With Homebrew:
```
brew install --cask rstudio
```
Git: Git is used throughout many sessions in the courses. With Homebrew:
```
brew install git
```

R: Any version above 4.1.2. If you have used R before, you can confirm the version by running R.version.string in the Console.
```
sudo apt -y install r-base
```
RStudio: Any version above v2021.09.0+351. If you have installed it before, check the current version by going to the menu Help -> About RStudio.
Git: Git is used throughout many sessions in the courses.
```
sudo apt install git
```

All these programs are required for the course, even Git. Git, which is a software program to formally manage versions of files, is used because of it’s popularity and the amount of documentation available for it. At the end of the course, you will be using Git and GitHub to manage your group assignment. Check out the online book Happy Git with R, especially the “Why Git” section, for an understanding on why we are teaching Git. Windows users tend to have more trouble with installing Git than macOS or Linux users. See the section on Installing Git for Windows for help.

Some pictures may show a Git pane in RStudio, but you may not see it. If you haven’t created or opened an RStudio R Project (which is taught in the introductory course), the Git pane does not show up. It only shows up in R Projects that use Git to track file changes.

A note to those who have or use work laptops with restrictive administrative privileges: You may encounter problems installing software due to administrative reasons (e.g. you don’t have permission to install things). Even if you have issues installing or updating the latest version of R or RStudio, you will likely be able to continue with the course as long as you have the minimum version listed above for R and for RStudio. If you have versions of R and RStudio that are older than that, you may need to ask your IT department to update your software if you can’t do this yourself. Unfortunately, Git is not a commonly used software for some organizations, so you may not have it installed and you will need to ask IT to install it. We require it for the course, so please make sure to give IT enough time to be able to install it for you prior to the course.

Once R, RStudio, and Git have been installed, open RStudio. If you encounter any troubles during these pre-course tasks, try as best as you can to complete the task and then let us know about the issues in the pre-course survey of the course. If you continue having problems, indicate on the survey that you need help and we can try to book a quick video call to fix the problem. Otherwise, you can come to the course 15-20 minutes earlier to get help.

If you’re unable to complete the setup procedure due to unfixable technical issues, you can use Posit Cloud (to use RStudio on the cloud) as a final solution in order to participate in the course. For help setting up Posit Cloud for this course, refer to the Posit Cloud setup guide.