The first tutorial of our Study Group is going to be a friendly introduction to GitHub and RStudio for version control.

What is it about

Version control lets you keep track of all the changes you have made to your files, be them data, code scripts or papers. You are probably already doing a sort of version control, if you have many files saved in your directory such as analysis_v1.txt, analysis_v2.txt etc. This approach will leave you with tens, or hundreds, of similar files, it makes it rather cumbersome to directly compare different versions, and is not easy to share among collaborators. With version control software such as Git, version control is much smoother and easier to implement. Using an online platform like Github to store your files also means that you have an online back up of your work, so you won’t need to panic when your laptop dies or files mysteriously disappear.

When and where

We will meet on the 22nd of March from 17:00 to 18:30 in Room ZB16 in the Zoology Building.

How to prepare

No previous experience with R or Git is required, just bring your laptop with R and RStudio installed.
We will also need you to install Git and get a free account on GitHub. You can find a guide on how to do this here.

Hope to see you there!