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.
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.
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.
From an R console, type:
update.packages(ask=FALSE)
This will automatically update all of your packages to the latest version.
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"))