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Introduction to R

May 13, 2013, 3121 Snedecor

Karsten Maurer, karstenm@iastate.edu.
Susan Vander Plas, skoons@iastate.edu.
Adam Loy, aloy@iastate.edu.

The Introduction to R workshops will teach you how to get started with the statistical software R. The course will be data centric, with lots of different data sets that illustrate examples of the different techniques used for different problems.

The course will be a mix of instruction and follow-up exercises. It will be held in a computer lab but you are encouraged to bring your own laptops, with software already loaded. A list of software will be available at this site several days prior to the workshop.

Price:

$40 covers the whole day for students of Iowa State University, for other affiliates with Iowa State the fee is $60, to be paid by check (make check payable to Iowa State University) or cash with Marlene Tjernagel (1121G Snedecor).

Please contact Heike Hofmann (hofmann@iastate.edu) for fees in case you are not affiliated with the university.

Lectures and timetable

Date	Notes	Lecture and Resources
12:00 – 12:30	Download and install R, Setting Up	This will make sure that everybody's system is up and running. Setup.R
12:30 – 01:15	Motivating Example	First taste of R: Jumping right into it to get an idea of how to use R and what it is capable of. MotivatingExample.R
01:15 – 01:30	coffee break
01:30 – 03:00	Basics	Working with data and learning about vectors, indexing vectors, and additional statistical functions. R Reference Card Basics.R, YourTurn.R
03:00 – 03:15	coffee break
03:00 – 03:45	Data Structures	Using and examining the other data structures that are available in R. DataStructures.R, YourTurn.R
03:45 – 04:45	Packages and Basic Programming	Introduction to packages and finding useful packages. We will also cover simple programming constructs to make your life easier with R. PackagesProgramming.R
04:45 – 05:00	Questions and Survey	We very much appreciate any feedback you can give us. You can find a form here: survey.

Learning outcomes

After the end of the this one course, we expect you to be able to do the following:

• Use R for scientific/statistical calculations
• Be able to create or read in data and have the ability to manipulate the data accordingly
• Have the ability to explore data set characteristics and calculate summary statistics for real data sets
• Use the help functionality to find the functions you need to do what you want to do
• Install, use, and search for helpful external packages
• How to use basic programming constructs to make working with data easier

Getting Ready on your own machine

You can bring your own laptop and work on it, if you like to. In order to keep up with everybody else, we're asking that you start installing the following pieces of software ahead of coming to the workshop:

• Install R version 3.0 (from www.r-project.org)
• It is recommended that you install RStudio 0.97 (from www.rstudio.org)

Useful links

Recommended Reading:

• Introduction to R, by Andreas Buja. The whole introduction is written in R, so you can run through it and experiment. Before running each line I recommend you predict what output you will get. This will help you learn faster
• R for ecologists, yes, even though you might not be an ecologists, this is still good

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.