I Survived History 8510 . . . Now What?

Congrats! You’ve survived History 8510 and are now a Programming Historian!

You now know how to code. As you look forward to future digital projects, assignments, and classes remember that part of knowing how to code means that you also know how to read code. This semester you learned a lot of syntax and patterns, but you also learned how to learn to learn to do things. Going forward, build on this. See something you find interesting? Dig into the code to see how they did it. Teach yourself. Ask for help where needed and rely on your cohort and classmates. And…if all else fails…turn it off and back on again!

Don’t get rusty – keep practicing!

• Lots of ways to practice
  • One is to try something like Code Academy – student plans are discounted.
  • Another is to use the Programming Historian

Ideas to move your R skills forward:

• Read Hadley Whickam, Advanced R
• Learn to build reactive apps with R and Shiny:
  • RStudio’s Basic Shiny Tutorial
  • Yann Ryan, Making an Interactive Web Application with R and Shiny, The Programming Historian
• Look at some of the Programming Historian tutorials on R:
  • Sentiment Analysis, Temporal Network Graphs, Databases in R
• Learn to build simple static websites:
  • Hugo
  • Bootstrap or Foundation for theming
  • Github Pages for hosting

Still confused about GitHub?

• Try working some more with these concepts using CodeAcademy’s extensive git course.
  • Or this tutorial from freeCodeCamp
• Port your R knowledge to another language – perhaps Python!
  • Programming Historian’s 15 part Python Tutorial