# Teaching julia starting 20 jan. v0.5 or v0.6?
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/teaching-julia-starting-20-jan-v0-5-or-v0-6/1216
**Category:** General Usage
**Tags:** question, package
**Created:** [December 30, 2016, 11:04am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/teaching-julia-starting-20-jan-v0-5-or-v0-6/1216 "2016-12-30T11:04:50Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@floswald](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/floswald)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2016, 11:04am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/teaching-julia-starting-20-jan-v0-5-or-v0-6/1216/1 "2016-12-30T11:04:50Z")
Hi all,
I’m teaching a course using julia. it starts around the 20th of january. based on stefan’s announcement here: [0.6 release timeline](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/0-6-release-timeline/836) I’m uncertain of what the best option is for my students. I’m inclined to run the course on v0.5, but I’m afraid that students will run into trouble some time mid February when they do `Pkg.add("DataFrames")`, for example. In the best case they will see a bunch of deprecation warnings, but some packages may actually not work, if the maintainer uses v0.6 functionality. Having students check out a previous release of a package is an option that I would like to avoid.
any thoughts on this are helpful. thanks!
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### Author:  [@tknopp](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tknopp)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2016, 11:21am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/teaching-julia-starting-20-jan-v0-5-or-v0-6/1216/2 "2016-12-30T11:21:29Z")
this is what stable releases are for. Just stick with Julia 0.5 and there won’t be any problems
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### Author:  [@nalimilan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nalimilan)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2016, 8:48pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/teaching-julia-starting-20-jan-v0-5-or-v0-6/1216/3 "2016-12-30T20:48:57Z")
Regarding DataFrames, I would tell students to do `Pkg.pin("DataFrames")` at the start of the course too. See [this previous discussion](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/teaching-data-analysis-with-julia-what-to-do-about-dataframes-and-all-that/422/19).
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### Author:  [@j\_verzani](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/j_verzani)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2016, 10:07pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/teaching-julia-starting-20-jan-v0-5-or-v0-6/1216/4 "2016-12-30T22:07:57Z")
FWIW, I have found it helpful to create a package that students clone that handles this and other package related issues. I have one package that loads and reexports the main packages. It helps avoid frustration for those students who otherwise have issues with the initial start up of a new language.
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### Author:  [@floswald](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/floswald)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2016, 10:22pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/teaching-julia-starting-20-jan-v0-5-or-v0-6/1216/5 "2016-12-30T22:22:52Z")
thanks for the pointer to this excellent discussion, I couldn’t have formulated it as well as @dmbates. This is a course on computational economics, so the focus is on writing efficient code for computationally intensive algorithms. with the occasional `DataFrame` here and there. I’ll do the `pin` trick.