Your Toolkit

This part asks what you work with every day and how you keep a history of that work. It belongs to the first quarter, and every later chapter assumes it: the commands, the editor, and the version history introduced here are used without further explanation from Part III onward.

• 5  The Unix Shell teaches the Unix shell: moving around the filesystem, inspecting a raw file before R reads it, and composing pipelines.
• 6  Setting Up Your Workstation installs R, an IDE, Quarto, and Git, and verifies the machine with a checklist.
• 7  Git and GitHub for Solo Developers introduces Git and GitHub for a single analyst who wants a recoverable history.
• 8  Git for Teams extends that history to a team: branches, pull requests, review, and conflicts.
• 9  AI-Assisted Coding sets out how to prompt language models and coding agents, how to check what they produce, and what may be sent to them, before you rely on them in the chapters that follow.

If the quiz at the start of a chapter is easy, skip to the next. A reader who already uses Git daily may move quickly through 7  Git and GitHub for Solo Developers, but should still read Data governance and agent safety before sending any project file to a model.