README.md
In conjugateprior/pol345.student: Handout and Precept Materials for POL 345

Getting Started with R and R Studio

Hello! Welcome to POL 345 / SOC 305 / WWS 201. In order to participate in the course, you will need to install three pieces of software onto your computer.

The first piece of software we will install is R, which we will use for our statistical work.

Download and install R for Mac
Open your Terminal Application (you’ll find it in the Applications > Utilities folder) and type

xcode-select --install

Say yes to install the ‘command line tools’. (Machine tells you you’ve got them already? Then we’re all good.)

Download and install R for Windows
Download and install Rtools for Windows

If, in the steps above, you allowed R and RStudio to put an icon on your desktop then you now have two. Put R’s icon in the trash and keep the RStudio one. Things will be less confusing that way.

The second piece of software we will install is RStudio, which will be provide a nice interface with R.

Go to Rstudio's download page and find the section RStudio Desktop. We have already done step 1, so proceed to step 2 and download Rstudio for your operating system.

If, in the steps above, you allowed R and RStudio to put an icon on your desktop then you now have two. Put R’s icon in the trash and keep the RStudio one. Things will be less confusing that way.

Lastly, we will install LaTeX, which will allow you to compile your assignments to a PDF for submission.

For both Mac and Windows users,

OpenRStudio
Paste the following command into the Console. (It’s at the bottom left of the application window)
```
 install.packages('tinytex')

 tinytex::install_tinytex() # takes a while
```
NOTE for Mac users: You may get this error after running the second command above:

The directory /usr/local/bin is not writable. I recommend that you make it writable.

After the installation process finishes, another error most likely will appear stating add_link_dir_dir: destination /usr/local/bin not writable.

Run the following commands in Terminal to resolve this:

     sudo chown -R `whoami`:admin /usr/local/bin

     ~/Library/TinyTeX/bin/*/tlmgr path add

where whoami is the name you use to log in to your Mac.

Still in RStudio, select menu File > New File > RMarkdown
Click the Knit icon at the top of the file that just opened (it’s a ball of blue wool with a knitting needle in it) If all goes well a PDF document will be created.

You’re all set!

Alternatively, you can simply generate Word documents rather than pdf documents for the work handed in during the course. If you choose to do this, you should remember to ‘print to pdf’ these documents before uploading to Blackboard.

To check Word document creation works, go to the RMarkdown document you created above and instead of clicking on the Knit button, press the menu indicator just to the right of it and choose ‘Knit to Word’.

The pol345.student package

pol345.student allows students to unpack and complete questions in the pre-precept handouts for Princeton University's course Politics 345. This updated package is designed for the Fall 2021 Semster and was originally developed by Will Lowe and Marc Ratkovic in Fall 2019.

The problem sets are a bit too big for CRAN, so you'll want to make sure you've got the devtools package installed. To do so, you can run

install.packages('devtools')

Then grab the package from GitHub like this:

devtools::install_github("ratkovic/pol345.student")

In order to access the course materials, you will need to load the library. This can be done with the command

library(pol345.student)

This will allow you to call all the functions in the package. This needs to be run only once per session.

The package can be updated while installed by calling

update_package()

For good measure, now restart your R session. In RStudio use the menu: Session > Restart R.

To start work on handout one, type

pol345.student::get_handout(1)

This will unpack the handout materials into a folder called handout1 in your current working directory. (Type getwd() if you're not sure where that is. You can change it using setwd or through RStudio's Session menu).

If you want to fresh start on the same handout, you'll can unpack again under a different name (the get_handout function won't overwrite an existing folder.) To do this add a newname argument when y ou call the function. So, if you want your new copy to be called "handout1-for-real", then use

pol345.student::get_handout(1, newname = "handout1-for-real")

Provided there's not already a folder of that name in your current working directory, you'll get a fresh set of handout materials unpacked there.

If you want to preview the questions in a handout materials without unpacking it into your local file system, use

pol345.student::preview_handout(1)

Working on precept is just the same; just use get_precept(1), get_precept(1, newname = "precept1-second-go"), or preview_precept(1) as above.

You can view precept 1's 'answers' with

pol345.student::get_precept_answers(1)

Note: this shows one way to answer the questions. Often there will be others, so do not automatically assume that your code is incorrect if it does not match the code in the answers.