Help installing Visual Studio Code and other apps

[mbessar]

Hi, folks!

In the section today (4/3) and next Monday (4/8), I'll help you get started on the basics, such as the installation process and tips, of a few very useful apps for empirical and theoretical analysis. I'm organizing here a few handy links:

1. Visual Studio Code: This is a great tool. It's a free code editor where you can code in several languages. I use it for R and Python, for instance. I also strongly encourage you to have a student account here on GitHub, with your UCSC email since it enables you to have access to a super neat AI Copilot Pro extension for free. It gives you inline code suggestions, and you may also benefit from the chat extension, where you can ask for general commands for the code you want to run.

2. Get started with Jupyter Notebook (Python): I use Jupyter Notebooks to code in Python due to its interactive interface. You may run chunks of code separately or all at once.

3. How to set up and run Jupyter notebooks in Visual Studio Code: Another video teaching how to properly set up Jupyter notebooks in the VS Code environment.

4. How to install and run R in VS Code: You can do with R the same things you do in Stata, but for free. You can do everything in Python if you want to.

5. Overleaf: Easy way to create and compile your presentations and paper. You can also share your projects with your team colleagues. Signing up with your UCSC account has a few additional benefits.

6. Matlab: Easy step-by-step on how to install Matlab for free with the UCSC license.

7. Stata: The student price is $48/6 months.

8. iClicker: We will be using iClicker for the section quizzes starting on 4/10. Please join us here.