A {fun} Intro to R Programming

Pre-Workshop To-Do List

Welcome to the pre-workshop to-do list for the Intro to R Programming workshop during the Data Science Summer School (DS3) 2023!

This workshop is taught using R and RStudio on your computer. So some minor preparations are necessary for a smooth experience. They should not take too long for you to complete and hopefully we can avoid any surprises on the day of the workshop!

Install

First of all, we want to download R. Find below install links depending on your operating system:

Install

Next, please download & install RStudio.

RStudio is a graphical interface in which we can program in R. You can write, save and open R Code within RStudio an it also provides syntax-highlighting, auto-completion & many more conveniences!

VERY IMPORTANT:

Please make sure you have the latest version of RStudio installed.

It should be at least any version more recent than July 2022 (2022.07.0+548) which can be downloaded here. We are going to use some brand new features in RStudio during this workshop, so please make sure you have an updated version!

💻 Download Workshop files

Please download the workshop files from this Dropbox folder.

The link will download a .zip file. Extract it to its own folder:

The contents of the new folder should look like this:

On to the final step!

📦 Install R packages

Finally, we need some R packages. It will be convenient if you already have the necessary R packages installed for the workshop.

Packages are at the heart of R:

  • R packages are basically a collection of additional R functionalities that you can use.

  • They contain code that other R users have prepared for the community.

Instructions

  1. Double-click on the install.R file

This will open your RStudio environment with the install.R script open.

  1. Next, click on the Source tab which will run all the R code in your script (as opposed to Run, which will only run the R code you select!).

3. You should see some code running in your console like this:

Let it run and it should be done after a few moments.

Note: If you use Ubuntu Linux then you need to install the following non-R packages on your computer before you can install the tidyverse:

sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev

🎉 All Set 🎉

Congratulations!

Now you have everything installed on your computer and the fun can begin! 🎉🎉🎉