Introduction to R/Rstudio

With general tips and tricks for working with R and RStudio

Welcome to the first workshop of the BayesCog course!

The first workshop is designed to primarily introduce those without any previous experience to R and RStudio so that everyone is on the same page for the subsequent workshops. We will also cover tips and tricks with working in R, so it may also be useful for those already familiar!

This workshop assumes no prior programming experience.

Keep learning R beyond this workshop

Learning to program in R cannot be covered in a single session — this workshop serves only as a basic introduction to the key concepts you will need for the rest of the course. We therefore strongly encourage you to complement it with additional resources as you continue to develop your skills. A few excellent, freely available starting points are:

• R for Data Science (2nd ed.) — Wickham, Çetinkaya-Rundel & Grolemund
• Hands-On Programming with R — Grolemund
• swirl: Learn R, in R — interactive, in-console lessons
• An Introduction to R — the official CRAN manual

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:

• Navigate the RStudio interface
• Create and manipulate R’s core data types and structures (vectors, data frames, lists)
• Write functions and use basic control flow (if/else, loops)
• Install and load R packages and produce plots with ggplot2

Working directory for this workshop

Model code and R scripts for this workshop are located in the (/workshops/01.R_basics) directory. Remember to use the R.proj file within each folder to avoid manually setting directories!