There are a couple of files here that might be interesting to you. First, git.md is the main document. It is an early version of a working guide to Git and GitHub for political scientists. The second is notes.md, which is where I just store snippets of code that I plan to add (or consider adding) to the main document.
Zach Jones prompted me to use Git/GitHub with his article in The Political Methodologist. I'm not a programmer, but I'm probably above the median in tech-savyness. Git/GitHub was hard for me to learn. I'm still a little unsure of myself.
I had no trouble installing Git, setting up a GitHub account, initializing, adding, committing, and pushing. But I had (and still have) a lot of questions. Many of these question did not revolve around the software, but around best practices.
- How often should I commit changes?
- What files should I track? Should I track the data? The manuscript?
- Given that I'm not writing and releasing different versions software, how should I be using tags?
In short, most users of Git/GitHub are programmers. I am a political scientist. Most users track software. I want to track empirical research projects. I had a lot of difficulty mapping the Git/GitHub facilities onto my needs as a researcher. I suggested the Zach write a guide for people like me. He told me:
Git is a really complex piece of software. It isn't hard to learn how to do basic things, but introductions are probably better left to people who really understand things.
Well, I've poked around the Internet and can't find a useful introduction to GitHub for political scientists. For example, I'd like to have my graduate students publicly version control their research projects this fall, but I can't find a good introduction to Git/GitHub that suits their need.
So what I've decided to do is put together all the useful links and snippets of code that I've found useful and describe how I've incorporated it into my workflow. I'm certain that I could be doing things better. There are probably things that are just plain wrong. If you see things that I could do better or should do differently, please create an issue or, even better, fork the repository and suggest a change.