2  The R Environment

2.1 What is this class

 

It is not a pipe but oil paint on canvas.

René Magritte was a surrealist painter that encouraged the viewer to use their free mind to explore the logical shortcuts that human take when viewing items and instead to encourage alternative thinking about what is in front of you.

2.2 Data Analysis

 

2.3 Why R?

 

2.4 What is R?

R is a language for data analysis and manipulation.

  • Based upon S-Plus (Bell Laboratories).
  • Open Source.
  • Collaborative.
  • Community Supported.

2.5 Challenges

Some of the challenges that I’ve seen individuals face when learning something like R.

  • This is not a point-and-click experience.
  • You will have to learn a grammar.
  • CASE SENSITIVITY MATTERS!

2.6 Benefits

There are several benefits to larning a general purpose analysis framework.

  • No vendor lock-in.
  • Data are data.
  • Transferable skills to other disciplines/problems/issues.

2.7 And Ultimately…

3 Today’s Schedule

3.1 Content Live Here

 

Don’t know GitHub? Start panicking! JK. We’ll get there together.

4 Today’s Activities

4.1 To Do Right Now!

 

First things first! We need to get everyone configured to have the most up-to-date versions of the software and libraries we are going to start with on this class.

Install R onto your laptop (version 4.2+).

 

If you have already installed R on your computer, you need to update it to the latest version. Please see this blog post before you start installing stuff.

4.2 To Do Right Now!

 

Next, let’s install an integrative developer environment (IDE).

Install RStudio—the “One True Interface” (2023.06.1+524 or later).

4.3 Yet Another “Right Now” activity

 

Install Quarto to help make dynamic documents, webpages, sites, and reports (1.0.38 or later)

4.4 Finally, “Right Now”

 

Install Packages that we’ll start with. These are located in my teaching GitHub repository but can be accessed directly from within R. This will configure some basic packages for you to start with (we will come back to this later).

 

source("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DyerlabTeaching/Welcome/main/StartingPackages.R")

4.5 Getting Additional Integration

Let’s let quarto install a few additional things on your machine. Switch over to the terminal in RStudio and type the following (for TeX)

quarto install tool tinytex

And if you do not have a version of Chrome on your laptop, also hit this one to aid in rendering images for pdf and docx files.

quarto install tool chromium

5 Questions?

Return to the course index page.