NEU-365P-385L-Spring-2021

[Hopefully this step is no longer necessary, but I'll leave these instructions just in case.].
Get the Anaconda Python distribution (latest version 3.x) from https://www.anaconda.com/download and just follow the install steps. Anaconda comes with a bunch of useful scientific libraries such as Numpy and Scipy that you would otherwise have to install yourself.
[Hopefully this step is no longer necessary, but I'll leave these instructions just in case.] !!! MacOS Catalina ONLY !!! If you are running MacOS Catalina, you might run into this problem: Anaconda creates a .bash_profile file in your home directory that needs to be renamed to .zprofile in Catalina (does NOT apply to older versions of MacOS).
Launch Anaconda Navigator. Install JupyterLab and Spyder via the widgets in the Home tab. JupyterLab is a web-based python notebook and Spyder is an environment for running Python that is similar to MATLAB.
Get R from https://cran.revolutionanalytics.com/index.html and run the installer.
Get RStuio Desktop from https://www.rstudio.com/. This is an environment for running R that is similar to MATLAB.
I recommend just following the instructions at https://docs.junolab.org/latest/man/installation/. Get the latest stable release. I also recommend installing the Atom editor and Juno IDE.
UT students have free access to MATLAB. Note, once you've registered you can also use MATLAB via an online interface that mimicks the application environment at https://matlab.mathworks.com.
Go to www.mathworks.com and create a user account. Your username MUST be your UT email address!
Go to UT Service Now and request MATLAB. Click the Request button in the MATLAB for Students Only box near the bottom of the page. Your request may take a day or two to process, so don't delay.
Sign in to your mathworks account and you should see a license from UT is available to you. Use that license to download MATLAB (latest version). Then run the installer. If you can afford the space (>20 GB) get all the toolboxes that you can. If not, get at least those toolboxes listed at https://www.mathworks.com/products.html under the MATLAB product family sections 'Math, Statistics, and Optimization', 'Signal Processing', 'Image Processing' and 'Computational Biology'.
Go to https://github.com and create an account if you don't already have one.
Go to https://desktop.github.com and download the GitHub Desktop app.
Open the app and select File->Clone Repository. Select URL and enter the URL of this repository (https://github.com/marcel-goldschen-ohm/NEU-365P-385L-Spring-2021), then click 'Clone'. This will download all of the files in this repository to a folder on your computer. To navigate to the folder from GitHub Desktop select Repository->Show in Finder (that's for MacOS, wording may differ on Windows machines).
Whenever you want to make sure that you have the latest version of all files in the repository, select Repository->Pull to download ONLY what has changed since the last time you downloaded the repository.
To make sure you do not overwrite any homework assignment files, I recommend copying all of the homeworks into a separate folder on your computer rather than editing the files directly in the GitHub repository folder.