A Gentle Introduction to R

       

A Tufts University Data Lab Workshop
Written by Uku-Kaspar Uustalu and Kyle Monahan

 

Resources: go.tufts.edu/R
Slides: tufts.box.com/v/intro-r-slides
Live offerings: go.tufts.edu/workshops
Contact: datalab-support@elist.tufts.edu

---

Table of Contents

• Workshop Overview
• Running the Workshop using RStudio Server in your Browser (Recommended)
• Running the Workshop using a Local R and RStudio Installation

---

Workshop Overview

An introductory R workshop that is suitable for self-guided study and covers the following:

• Variables and datatypes
• Working with vectors (arrays) and lists
• Commands for descriptive statistics
• R packages and the tidyverse
• Reading data from a file
• Working with data frames
• Basic data wrangling (cleaning)
• Creating and tweaking visualizations

---

Running the Workshop using RStudio Server in your Browser (Recommended)

1. Click on the Launch Binder button above.
2. A Binder instance will launch in a new tab with the message Starting Repository.
3. Wait patiently and do not close the Binder tab. After a few minutes, an RStudio instance will launch.
4. Once RStudio has launched, locate the Files tab in the bottom-right. It should list intro-r.R along with other files.
5. Click on intro-r.R in the Files tab to launch the workshop.

---

Running the Workshop using a Local R and RStudio Installation

 

1. Make sure you have both R and RStudio installed. Instructions are available here: go.tufts.edu/installingR
2. Click on the Download Zip or Download TarGz button above to download an archive containing the workshop materials.
3. Extract the intro-r-workshop directory contained within the archive to a suitable location.
4. Open the extracted intro-r-workshop directory and ensure it contains intro-r.R along with other files.
5. Right-click on intro-r.R and select Open With > RStudio to launch the workshop.