If you’re not using version control, you should be. Learn git.

If you’re not on github, you should be. That’s real open source.

To help some colleagues get started with git and github, I wrote a minimal tutorial. There are lots of git and github resources available, but I thought I’d give just the bare minimum to get started; after using git and github for a while, other resources make a lot more sense and seem much more worthwhile.

And for R folks, note that it’s easy to install R packages that are hosted on github, using Hadley Wickham‘s devtools package. For example, to install Nacho Caballero‘s clickme package:

install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
install_github("clickme", "nachocab")

Having written that git/github tutorial, I thought: I should write more such!

So I immediately wrote a similar short tutorial on GNU make, which I think is the most important tool for reproducible research.