6 Pre-reading
If you haven’t already, go through the workshop overview section. Read the syllabus in Chapter 1, especially the part about what the workshop will cover and what we expect you to learn at the end of it. Then read the ‘Is this for you?’ section in Chapter 2 to clarify who we’ve designed and built this workshop for. Lastly, read the learning design section in Chapter 4 to get an overview of what types of activities we will do during the workshop as well as the reasons for them in relation to learning.
Related to the learning design, an important component of learning is repeated exposure to a concept or skill. We want you to read through specific sections of the material beforehand as we’ve found that these particular topics are often more difficult to grasp and understand for beginners. Reading it beforehand will give your brain some time to start processing the information, so that when you see it again during the workshop, it will be easier to understand and learn. During the workshop, you will read these sections again and we will explain them verbally as well, to further reinforce the concepts.
Because our main learning outcome is reproducible research, we will use tools like Git that is the foundation to doing reproducible research. Without a way to easily and quickly share code, your research cannot be independently reproducible. Using Git is the most common way to share code.
So, please read about version control and Git in Section 16.2, Section 16.3, and Section 16.4. Git and version control are some of the more difficult things you will learn in this workshop because they are fundamentally very different ways of working on your computer than you are used to. They require changing how you see and interact with your projects and computer in big ways.
Lastly, briefly read through the group project work section in Chapter 23 so you are familiar with what you will do at the end of the workshop. You’ll have time during the project work session to read through it again, but we’ve found that participants prefer and want to be aware beforehand on what is expected of them during the project work.
To keep track of which sections to read, here is a list:
6.1 Cheatsheets
RStudio provides some great cheatsheets that are fantastic resources and a great reference to have readily available, either on your computer or printed out. We suggest that you download at least these following cheatsheets and have them available either digitally or printed out during the workshop, especially for when you do the exercises and group project work: