STA 9750 Lecture #2 Pre-Class Assignment: Getting Started with Markdown

Key Dates:

  • Tuesday Class Date (Recommended Completion Date): 2026-09-08 before Lecture #02 (Tuesday Section)
  • Thursday Class Date (Recommended Completion Date): 2026-09-10 before Lecture #02 (Thursday Section)

This week, we are going to learn to use quarto, a data science publishing platform. quarto documents are written using Markdown, a light-weight mark-up language.12

For this week’s pre-assignment, complete this interactive Markdown tutorial, which should take you about 10 minutes. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with Markdown, take a look at the source code for this website and see how certain Markdown documents are rendered as web pages.

During this week’s lab session, we will take particular advantage of:

so make sure to pay attention to those parts of the tutorial.

After you are done with the introduction to Markdown, log in to CUNY Brightspace and complete the Pre-Assignment 02 “Getting to Know You” quiz. As part of this quiz, you will be asked to attest that you successfully completed the Markdown tutorial.

If you haven’t done so already, make sure you complete the Syllabus Quiz or you won’t be able to submit the quiz associated with this Pre-Assignment.

NoteAdditional Resources
  • DataCamp: “Reporting with R Markdown”
  • Textbook: R4DS §28-29

Footnotes

  1. Get it? If you learn nothing else in this class, you will certainly learn that programmers love terrible puns. R itself is actually a pun as it was originally a free ‘knock-off’ of the S programming language developed by Ross and Rob.↩︎

  2. A mark-up language is a way of specifying the formatting applied to given text. It exists somewhere between “plain text” and a full document format like a .docx file. Other markup languages include HTML (hyper text markup language), rST (reStructured Text), LaTeX (used for scientific typesetting), and many others. Markdown is the simplest of these and the only one you will be required to write in this course. You will need to learn a bit of how HTML is structured and, if you are including math in your mini-project or final project submissions, a bit of LaTeX will go a long way.↩︎