Onboarding Instructions for CS&SS 564, Spring 2018

Please complete the following before the first day of class (Tuesday, March 27, 2018).

  1. Sign up for our Slack workplace, https://uwcsss564.slack.com. We will use this for announcements, and asking and answering questions in this course. You should have received an invite. If not email the instructors to receive one.

  2. Sign into the course Slack workplace https://uwcsss564.slack.com, and leave a message on the #onboarding channel. In the message introduce yourself, explain why you are taking this course, and what you hope to get out of taking this course.

  3. Tell use about yourself: Complete the pre-course survey. If you are registered for the course, you should have received an email. If not, you can find a link pinned on the #onboarding channel of Slack.

  4. We will use git for version control. and GitHub for distributing, collecting, and commenting on assignments.

    1. Download Git and install git. You should be able to use defaults for all settings.

    2. Sign up for a GitHub account at https://github.com (if you do no already have one).

    3. Tell us what your GitHub username is using the form emailed to you, or that can be found pinned on the #onboarding channel in Slack.

  5. Download that you have installed and downloaded R:

    1. If you have R installed already, check have the latest version of R. At the start of this course, the most recent version of R is 3.4.4. You can find this in R:

      $ sessionInf()

    2. If you do not have R or the latest version of it installed, then download it from CRAN.

    3. Update all installed R packages,

      $ update.packages(ask = FALSE)

  6. Download that install RStudio Desktop (Open Source Edition). RStudio provides a friendly interface to R (an IDE). (If you are proficient with R and have been using another IDE or text editor with R, you can skip this step.)

    1. If you do not have RStudio installed, download and install it from here.

    2. If you already have RStudio installed, check that you have the latest version by selecting Help > Check for Updates in the menu. Download and install the newest version if not.

  7. Install LaTeX. We will not use LaTeX directly. But we will use it to create PDFs from R Markdown files. If you do not have LaTeX installed on your machine, download and install a LaTeX distribution. There are many different distributions, but these are the ones common to each distribution.

    • Windows: MikTex

    • MacOS: MacTex

    • Linux: tex-live is the most common LaTeX distribution. Install it using your distribution’s package manager.

    Note, these are very large files and can take a while to download.