On May 17 I will be running a free workshop in Berkeley titled Mapping Open Data in R. During the workshop you will have a chance to write code and do exercises to reinforce what you learn.

The most common problems that people encounter in R workshops relate to having out of date software libraries. The instructions below are designed to make sure that you, as a participant, can work through the workshop material without fussing with installing software.

If you are planning to attend, please consider following these steps before the meetup.

1. Get the latest version of R

At the time of this writing, the current version of R is 3.3.0. Here is how to check your version of R:

> version
               _
platform       x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0
arch           x86_64
os             darwin13.4.0
system         x86_64, darwin13.4.0
status
major          3
minor          3.0
year           2016
month          05
day            03
svn rev        70573
language       R
version.string R version 3.3.0 (2016-05-03)
nickname       Supposedly Educational

If you don’t currently have 3.3.0, you can get it here.

2. Get the latest version of RStudio

If you have RStudio installed, click “Help” -> “Check for Updates”. This will tell you if you have the latest version installed. If you don’t have the latest version installed (or don’t have any version installed), click here.

3. Make sure you have the latest version of all packages

From an R console, type:

update.packages(ask=FALSE)

This will automatically update all of your packages to the latest version.

4. Install the necessary packages

In the workshop we will be using a few packages that I created. To use install them, type the following:

install.packages(c("rUnemploymentData", "choroplethrMaps"))