Setting up Julia, GitHub, and Quarto

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Lab

2023-08-25

How to lab

Today

1. How to lab

2. Getting set up

Overview

Labs are in-class exercises intended to get practice with coding or analysis workflows.

• Instructions available on website
• Download ahead of time by using link from Canvas
• You will have your own repository (more in a minute)
• Try to finish in class, but due in 1 week

Tool overview

In this class, we will use

1. Julia
2. GitHub
3. Quarto
4. VS Code (suggested)

Why Julia?

• Syntax
  • Readable to computers and humans
  • Closely parallels math notation
• Designed for numerical and scientific computing

• Fast!
  • “Two language problem”
  • All you need is Julia
• Open source

Julia example

A (naive) implementation of the Fibonacci sequence:

function fib(n)
    if n < 2
        return n
    else
        return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)
    end
end
fib(10)

55

GitHub

1. You need a GitHub account
2. Code is stored in “repositories”
3. clone a repository to your computer
4. Make changes and commit them
5. push your changes to GitHub
6. Using GitHub classroom, instructors can view your code

Quarto

Quarto is a tool that allows you to combine text and code and create many types of output

• This website is made with Quarto
• You will use Quarto to create reports for labs
  • Everything in one place
  • No running code, save a figure to Downloads, copy into Word, then update your code and try to remember where to paste it
• Reproducible

VS Code

1. VS Code is a text editor
   1. If you are an advanced user of another text editor, you can use that instead, but I recommend VS Code
2. VS Code can work as a Julia IDE

Getting set up

Today

1. How to lab

2. Getting set up

Detailed instructions

See Setup

Lab 01 Instructions

1. Install software up following instructions on course website
2. clone the repository for lab 01 (use the Github Classroom link from Canvas)
3. Edit the solutions.qmd file to add your name and netID
4. commit and push your changes