Sharing a 2-hour crash course that gets you from no programming experience to using the R tidycensus package so that you can replicate and automate your ACS data processes.
The full 2-hour tutorial was done for the Southern California Association of Government's Toolbox Tuesday and can be watched here on YouTube. A pared down version was also presented at the 2024 Applied Demography Conference.
The script used for this tutorial, sample data, and a handy "Key ACS variables for planners" guide is here on GitHub.