my6136

This GitHub repo provides a template you can use to organize your work for Psy6136: Categorical Data Analysis (or any course). It provides:

• A reasonable organization of folders for your work. Feel free to add any others

my6136
  ├── assign
  ├── data
  ├── images
  ├── notes
  ├── R
  └── tutorials

• Some templates for using Rmarkdown in assignments or projects and also for setting up R scripts so you “compile” them with knitr to produce output in HTML, DOCX, PDF, … The following are provided, just to get you started:

  • Assignment template: Simple template for using an R script for an assignment. This appears like this in HTML when you knitr it.
  • Rmarkdown template: For a report, with more text than code. Code is in R “chunks”
  • R script template: For an R script, with output rendered to HTML, DOCX, or PDF

Getting started

I recommend that you set up an RStudio project for your work in the course, where you can organize your notes and work on assignments, projects, etc.

This repository on GitHub: my6136 provides a template for this. You can simply download the ZIP file to your computer, unzip it, and then open it in RStudio (double-click on the file my6136.Rproj).

Using GitHub

If you are comfortable using GitHub, you can simply fork & clone this repo to your own account. Details on this are given in fork and clone this repo. The images below show what’s involved for my6136.

   

If you don’t yet use GitHub, you can easily create a GitHub account (highly recommended: Your future self will thank me!)

Installing packages

You will need a bunch of R packages for this course. The file R/install-vcd-packages.R contains the ones I recommend. Simply run this in RStudio.

PDF output

In RStudio, rendering scripts and .Rmd files to PDF uses pandoc to convert to LaTeX .tex files and then working LaTeX installation to convert to PDF. The R package tinytex makes this relatively easy.

Learning to use Git and GitHub

For more details on using Git and Github for working with R, see:

• Jenny Bryan’s Getting Started with GitHub
• How to use Git and GitHub with R