There are several software packages that you must have on your laptop for this course.
R is an open-source programming language that you can download and install on any computer. Installing R gives you the language interpreter and a simple interactive shell.
RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R. It includes a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution, as well as tools for plotting, history, debugging and workspace management.
There will a very brief introduction to R in class. There are many ways to learn R more systematically online. One possibility is DataCamp. They have previously provided free access to students registered in my courses, but they are currently (summer 2020) not responding to requests. If you are unfamiliar with R, a good way to start is probably by taking 4 hours to work through DataCamp’s Introduction to R. Another possibility is to work through Hadley Wickham’s free online book R for Data Science.
The standard system for mathematical typesetting. You must use it for your assignments, final project and presentations.
There are several distributions of TeX but TeXLive has the advantage of having both Windows and OS X versions and including reasonable TeX/LaTeX editors (TeX is a typesetting program and does not itself include an editor).
Emacs is a very powerful editor and can be used for - among other things - R and LaTeX. The learning curve is a little bit steep, but the payoff comes in efficiency. Use is optional but encouraged.
bin/addpm once in order to configure emacs and
create an icon under the Start menuAquamacs (http://aquamacs.org) is a good graphical version of Emacs
for OS X. You can just also run the command emacs from a
Terminal or XQuartz window.
There are a number of spell-checkers that understand LaTeX, for example:
The unix wc command can be used to count words in a plain text file.
To use it, you first need to remove the TeX macros from your file.
You can then pipe the output into wc. For example, from the terminal
window on a Mac you can type detex <filename> | wc where you
need to insert the filename of the file in question.
If you have a Mac, the texcount command is much more helpful than
the above. The command line syntax is texcount filename, after
which helpful information is spewed on your screen.