Getting Started

Everything you need to get started with the course

Author
Affiliation

Claudius Gräbner-Radkowitsch

EUF and JKU

Tools

This course uses three tools throughout:

  • R — statistical computing language (you already know this from the prior course)
  • Quarto — reproducible document and report system
  • GitHub — version control and collaboration platform

GitHub account

You need a GitHub account to access course materials and submit take-home tasks.

If you do not have one yet, create a free account at github.com. Once you have an account, we strongly recommend registering for the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which gives you access to a range of professional tools for free:

The Student Pack also unlocks GitHub Codespaces — a browser-based RStudio environment that requires zero local installation. This is the recommended way to work in this course.

Coding environment

Option A — GitHub Codespaces: No installation needed. All required R packages come pre-installed. Start by forking the repository to create your own personal copy on GitHub — this lets you save and commit your work freely.

  1. Go to the course material repository on GitHub and click Fork (top-right corner)
  2. On your fork, click the green Code button → Codespaces → Create codespace on main
  3. A VS Code window opens in your browser — this is normal. Do not close it.
  4. The first time, setup takes up to 5 minutes while R and packages are installed. Watch the progress in the terminal at the bottom of the VS Code window.
  5. Once setup is complete, type rserver in the VS Code terminal and press Enter. When the login prompt appears, enter rstudio as both the username and the password.
  6. Wait until the terminal shows a plain prompt before working in R — package installation may still be running in the background.

Important: once your Codespace is built, do not create a new one next time. Go to github.com/codespaces, find your existing Codespace, and click Open.

When new session materials are added to the course repo, click Sync fork on your fork’s GitHub page, then Pull in the RStudio Git pane to get the updates.

Option B — local RStudio: Install R 4.4+, RStudio, and run:

install.packages(c("tidyverse", "plm", "modelsummary", "fixest",
                   "lmtest", "sandwich", "patchwork"))

You might need to install additional packages during the course.

The advantage of the local installation is that you can work offline, you have everything you need on your computer and you are completely independent. Moreover, the local version of R Studio will always be faster. At the same time, installation may be a bit more cumbersome. For more info on how to install R and the relevant packages, see the installation guidelines of the previous course.

Git in this course: four things you need

You interact with Git via the RStudio Git pane — no command line required.

Action What it does
Pull Get the latest version from GitHub
Stage Select which changed files to include in your snapshot
Commit Save a snapshot with a short description message
Push Send your snapshot to GitHub

That is all you need. No branching, no merging. For a full introduction, see the GitHub Skills: Introduction to GitHub tutorial.

Questions and discussion

All course questions go through GitHub Discussions on the material repository. This keeps the discussion visible to everyone and searchable.

Moodle is used for official announcements and grades only.

Material

An overview of all sessions and materials is on the Schedule & Overview page. Session pages are added progressively as the course proceeds.