Part 2 – The toolchain
Part 2 is the toolchain proper, sorted by the job that each tool does: something to analyse with, somewhere to write it, and a way to publish and share it, which is the part that most courses skip. Each layer gets its own slides, and the part ends with a first session in R in the workspace you opened before the break.
| Work through | What you do | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Slides, the toolchain | The map: languages, editors, and the publishing layer. The tools that the day uses are ringed in orange, and the rest are the alternatives you are choosing between. | 10 minutes |
| Slides, languages and editors, with Positron, RStudio and VS Code as the companion | Programming languages, and what you are choosing when you choose one; editors and IDEs, and the trap that every notebook-style tool shares. | 12 minutes |
| Slides, plain text and the render pipeline, with Quarto and reproducible documents as the companion | Plain-text file formats and why they survive, and what happens when a document renders. | 12 minutes |
| Slides, the package layer | What a package is, where it comes from, and what pinning it to a fixed version buys you. | 8 minutes |
| Slides, version control, archives and licences, with Git and GitHub and Reproducibility repositories as companions | Version control; where data and code are archived; what a licence allows others to do with your work. | 20 minutes |
| Slides, the R tutorial, in your workspace | Ten slides worked live: R in one slide, getting data in, inspecting the data, working with rows and columns, model formulas, fixed effects with fixest, reading what comes back, plotting with ggplot2, causal graphs in R, and common error messages. Type along. | 28 minutes |
By the end of the part you can place any tool someone names on the map, you know what the render step does to the report you will fill in, and you have read a data frame, fitted a model and drawn a figure in your own workspace.