The R-Podcast Episode 12: Using Version Control with R

This is not an April Fool’s joke … The R-Podcast is back once again! In this episode, I discuss the concept of version control and how you can get started with using the Git VCS right now with your R projects. Also I discuss a big batch of listener feedback, and highlight a couple of great visualization applications from the community using ggplot2. All of that and more on episode 12 of the R-Podcast!

Episode 12 Show Notes

The basics for version control and Git

• Why it’s important: Backups and reproducibility
• Git is available for all major platforms, see GitHub page for installation instructions for all operating systems
• IDEs RStudio and Eclipse via Egit plugin offer integration of Git for easy usage
• Key commands: git init, git add file.R, git commit -m “my commit message”
• Tell Git what files you don’t want to be tracked with .gitignore file(s)
• GitHub and BitBucket are two excellent remote repository host sites
• Wikipedia article on revision control
• Pro Git book, with electronic copy available for free!
• How do you combine revision control with workflow in R
• R and version control for the solo data analyst
• Jeremy Anglim’s tutorial on Using Git, Egit, Eclipse, and GitHub for version control
• Win-Vector blog on minimal version control lesson
• Top 10 Git Tutorials for Beginners
• Aha moments when learning Git

Listener Feedback

• Daniel provides link to Open Education Database: www.oedb.org/open
• StatisticsBlog: www.statisticsblog.com
• Aron: Big data and parallel processing
• Eric: Questions about data structures
• Adam: Text mining and workflow
• Randall offers first donation for the R-Podcast (thanks, Randall!)

R Community Roundup

• Visualization of season performance of NCAA tournament teams by Rodrigo Zamith
• Plotting lm and glm models with ggplot via strengejacke.wordpress.com

Package pick

• reports: An R package to assist in the workflow of writing academic articles and other reports (via TRinker’s blog)

How to interact with the show

• Submit your questions and comments via the R-Podcast contact page, or send an email to theRcast(at)gmail.com
• Send in an audio comment via audio attachment to theRcast(at)gmail.com, or leave a voicemail on the R-Podcast voicemail hotline: +1-269-849-9780
• Get show updates via our Twitter account: @theRcast
• Follow us on our R-Podcast Google Plus page: gplus.to/thercast
• Provide your favorite R community links at the R-Podcast subreddit: links.r-podcast.org/

Music Credits

• The opening theme is entitled “Super Fighting Robot X” by WillRock from the Megaman X: Maverick Rising Album at ocremix.org
• The closing theme is entitled “Countdown to Infinity” by WillRock from the Megaman X: Maverick Rising Album at ocremix.org