CDS 101 lecture slides

Overview

These are the R Markdown source files for my CDS 101 lecture slides, a course I developed and teach at George Mason University. The R Markdown files are converted into remark HTML5 slideshows via the xaringan R package and presented directly from the web browser.

Prerequisites

The following software and R packages are required if you want to convert the R Markdown documents into remark slideshows yourself.

Software

• R (>=3.4)

• RStudio (>=1.1.456), preview release recommended

• (Windows) Rtools: match the Rtools version to the R version and perform a full install

• (Mac) Xcode Command Line Tools: needed for compiling source code in certain R packages

  # To install Xcode Command Line Tools, open up a terminal window and run the following
  xcode-select --install

• (Optional) git: needed to clone the repository as a new project in RStudio

R packages

broom      (>= 0.5.0)
dplyr      (>= 0.7.6)
forcats    (>= 0.3.0)
ggplot2    (>= 3.0.0)
gridExtra  (>= 2.3)
infer      (>= 0.3.1)
kableExtra (>= 0.9.0)
lubridate  (>= 1.7.4)
modelr     (>= 0.1.2)
purrr      (>= 0.2.5)
readr      (>= 1.1.1)
robotstxt  (>= 0.6.0)
rvest      (>= 0.3.2)
stringr    (>= 1.3.1)
tidyr      (>= 0.8.1)
tidyverse  (>= 1.2.1)
xaringan   (>= 0.7)

See Install for an easy way to install the above R packages.

Install

Obtain a copy of this repo either by cloning it as a new RStudio project or by downloading the zip archive. Activate the project by clicking the file lecture-slides.Rproj in the RStudio file browser. Then, in an R console, type the following to install the necessary R packages:

install.packages("remotes", repos = "https://cran.rstudio.com")
remotes::install_deps()

Usage

The provided Makefile can be run within RStudio and contains rules for automatically knitting every R Markdown file in this repository and saving the result to a build/ directory. To run the Makefile, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Alt+B or click the Build tab in the upper-right window and then click the Build All button. Once the build process completes, you will find the newly converted slideshows in a newly created folder called build/.

To view the slideshows, open the HTML files using your web browser. I recommend using Google Chrome for this as it seems to provide the best rendering of these files. Please note that these HTML files should not be moved to another location on your computer, otherwise they will not render correctly in your browser.

Publishing slides to GitHub pages

Run this in the terminal to replace absolute links (to chunk figure outputs) with relative links:

find build -type f -name "*.html" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i -e 's./home/dominic/Dropbox/GMU/CDS101/master-repos/./.g'

Then force add the build directory (git add -f build), commit, and push.

Note that this may break the ability to run the slides locally...

Useful Syntax

• Highlight lines with the flair package: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/flair/vignettes/how_to_flair.html

• .pull-left[] and .pull-right[] for columns

• Add the line count: false to a slide before its title to use the same numbering as the previous slide.

• Put presenter notes under a line with three question marks:

  Slide contents.
  
  ???
  
  Presenter notes.
  

• Presenting shortcuts:

  • h or ? to pull up help.
  • f to go to fullscreen.
  • c to clone a 2nd synced versions of slides in another window.
  • p to enter presenter mode. Use in conjunction with c.

License

Unless otherwise noted, these materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.