Introduction to R
| Audience | Computational skills required | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| Biologists | None | 2-3 hour workshop (~2-3 hours of trainer-led time) |
Description
This repository has teaching materials for a 2-3 hour, hands-on Introduction to R workshop led at a quick pace. The workshop will give participants an overview of the basics of R and RStudio. R is a simple programming environment that enables the effective handling of data, while providing excellent graphical support. RStudio is a tool that provides a user-friendly environment for working with R.
These materials are intended to provide a quick overview of the R programming language.
Learning Objectives
- R syntax: Understanding the different ‘parts of speech’ in R; introducing variables and functions, demonstrating how functions work, and modifying arguments for specific use cases.
- Data structures in R: Getting a handle on the classes of data structures and the types of data used by R.
- Data inspection and wrangling: Reading in data from files. Using indices and various functions to subset, merge, and create datasets.
- Exporting data: Generating new data tables for use outside of the R environment.
- Visualizing data: Understand how to visualize data using the ggplot2 package.
These materials are developed for a trainer-led workshop, but also amenable to self-guided learning.
Contents
| Lessons | Estimated Duration |
|---|---|
| Introduction to R and RStudio | 20 min |
| Syntax and data structures | 35 min |
| Functions, arguments, packages and seeking help in R | 35 min |
| Data wrangling | 55 min |
| Data Visualization | 50 min |
Dataset
All the files used for the above lessons are linked within, but can also be accessed here.
Installation Requirements
We will be using RStudio Cloud for this tutorial.
If you wish to run RStudio locally, you can download the most recent versions of R and RStudio for your laptop.
Note: The materials here have been adapted from lesson material developed by members of the teaching team at the Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core (HBC). The original material is available here.