Coding for Economists

To read or use the book, head to the Coding for Economists website.

The rest of this readme is intended to help those who are contributing to the book, rather than readers.

Dev

These instructions are only for developers working on the book.

Making Changes

Contributions to Coding for Economists are welcome! If you're planning to make a pull request, lodge an issue to discuss it first but feel free to go straight to making a pull request for corrections, typos, and fixing out of date package issues.

Prerequisites:

• installation of uv
• Natural language processing models: within the Python environment, you will need to run uv run python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm to download the spacy model, and uv run python3 -m nltk.downloader all for the nltk models.
• Fonts: The book uses some special fonts, such as Varta, which you can find on Google fonts.
• LaTeX: The book was built with TeX Live.

You can see how to complete all of these steps programmatically by looking at how the Dockerfile does it.

To make changes:

1. create a new branch
2. install the Python environment or alternatively build and work in the docker image (which comes with the Python environment)
3. make your content changes, amending the Python environment as necessary (eg add packages via uv add <packagename>)
4. Check your changes look right with uv run quarto render --execute to render the book, and uv run python -m http.server -d _book 8000 to read it locally then head to "http://localhost:8000" to see it.
5. run pre-commit using uv run pre-commit run --all-files
6. if the checks clear, commit your change(s)
7. make a pull request

Your pull request will then be reviewed by an admin.

Using the docker image

There is a Dockerfile for the environment, which is the easiest way to set up a dev env. You run it by following these steps:

1. Ensure you have docker, the docker extension for VS Code, and the VS Code remote extension installed