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Introduction.md

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Before we start

IDE (Integrated Development Environment)

Today we will be using Rstudio.

RStudio makes R easier to use. Its an IDE including a console, a syntax-highlighting code editor, and tools for debugging, visualization and workspace management. Importantly, it helps us documenting everything that we do.

  • Code editor: write R scripts
  • R Console: interactively type R commands and see output
  • Workspace: view objects / searchable command history
  • Plot pane / files / R package manager / Integrated R help
  • Organize your scripts as projects (File | New Project...)

Work with projects

  • Under the File menu, click on New project, choose New directory, then Empty project
  • Enter a name for this new folder, and choose a convenient location for it. This will be your working directory for the rest of the day (e.g. ~/R_course)
  • Click on Create project
  • Under the Files tab on the right of the screen, click on New Folder and create a folder named data within your newly created working directory. (e.g. `~/R_course/data)
  • Create a new R script (File > New File > R script) and save it in your working directory (e.g. R-course-script.R)

Download data set

We’re going to spend a bit of time using a data set. You can download this from here (http://nicercode.github.io/intro/data/seed_root_herbivores.csv) and put it into the data directory. Download this file, open the R_course/data folder and move it there. Similarly, also grab this file (http://nicercode.github.io/intro/data/seed_root_herbivores.txt) and put it in the data directory too.

Why R?

  • open source software under GPL
  • widely used both in academia and industry
  • available on all platforms
  • not just for statistics, but also general purpose programming

Getting help

  • use Google (e.g. with an error message)
  • If you know the name of the function, you can use the built-in help: ?round
  • If the function is part of a package that is installed on your computer but don’t remember which one, you can type: ??kruskal
  • search the R package documentation https://www.rdocumentation.org/

Installation Instructions

For this course we will use Rstudio and R (any version). You can get R from https://cran.r-project.org/index.html and Rstudio from https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/