Programming Practices for Research in Economics

Meta-Information

• Course Instructors:

  • Lachlan Deer (@lachlandeer)
  • Julian Langer (@julianlanger)

• Teaching Assistants:

  • Lexi Schubert
  • Martin Stancsics

• Course Syllabus: click here

Important Links:

• Course website:
  • pp4rs.github.io/2021-uzh
• Installation Guide:
  • pp4rs.github.io/installation-guide
• Course Chatter:
  • pp4rs.slack.com/
• GitHub repositories
  • github.com/pp4rs

Accessing the Course Materials for the First Time

This repository will be updated frequently. Here are the necessary instructions so that you have your own copy, and it directly plugs in to ours, so you can get updates as needed:

1. Fork this repository by clicking Fork on the Github page
   • This gives you your own copy of the repository on GitHub
2. Clone your copy of the repository, by entering the following commands into a terminal after navigating to a folder that you want the materials to live inside:

       $ git clone https://github.com/YOURUSERNAME/2020-uzh-material.git

   • This gives you your own copy of the repository on your computer
3. Connect an upstream branch to the pp4rs master repository:

       $ git remote add upstream https://github.com/pp4rs/2020-uzh-material.git

   • This gives you the ability to connect to the repository where new materials will be added throughout the course

A guided example of forking the repository and downloading its contents:

Suppose Lachlan wants to clone the file repository to his own machine.

• First he forks a copy on GitHub.
• He wants to download the repository to a folder he has called phd-courses/first-year/ which lives inside his home folder. After opening a terminal on his computer he enters the following commands (after the `$`` sign):

  $ cd phd-courses/first-year
  ~/phd-courses/first-year/$ git clone https://github.com/lachlandeer/2020-uzh-material.git

Note: Notice how there was no whitespace in the filepath phd-courses\first-year. We recommend you also do not have whitespace in your paths, it makes everything less error prone.

Keeping your Course Materials up to date

When you want try and update your repository with new course material we post, use the following commands:

1. Navigate to the repository's root folder

       ~$ cd path/to/2020-uzh-material

   • Note: be careful and alter the path above to match your filesystem.
2. Fetch the new contents from the upstream branch

       ~/phd-courses/first-year/2020-uzh-material/$ git fetch upstream

3. Checkout the current branch, called master, of the files on your computer

       ~/phd-courses/first-year/2020-uzh-material/$ git checkout master

4. Merge the updated materials from upstream into master

       ~/phd-courses/first-year/2020-uzh-material/$ git merge upstream/master

Now you have the most upto date version of the course materials on your computer.

A guided example

Suppose Lachlan has come back after lunch and wants to download the materials for the afternoon session. After turning on his computer and opening a terminal he enters the following commands

    ~$ cd phd-courses/first-year/2020-uzh-material
    ~/phd-courses/first-year/2020-uzh-material$ git fetch upstream
    ~/phd-courses/first-year/2020-uzh-material$ git checkout master
    ~/phd-courses/first-year/2020-uzh-material$ git merge upstream/master

• Note: If you get an error message, as a first step ensure that you committed all your files from your last session.

License

All materials are licensed under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license. The license allows you to copy, remix and redistribute any of our publicly available materials, under the condition that you attribute the work (details in the license) and do not make profits from it. More information is available here

Suggested Citation

The suggested citation for this repository is:

Lachlan Deer and Julian Langer, 2021, Programming Practices for Research in Economics, University of Zurich

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.