During my workshop you will have a chance to write code and do exercises to reinforce what you learn. The most common problems that people encounter come from having an old version of R installed, or an old version of an R package installed. The checklist below is designed to ensure that you can participate in the workshop without fiddling with software during the workshop itself.

This checklist has 4 steps and should take about 5 minutes.

1. Update 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. Update 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. Update Packages

From an R console, type:

update.packages(ask=FALSE)

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

4. Install New 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"))