Preface

During the course we will be using R programming language within RStudio Desktop editor and writing scripts using R Markdown (.Rmd). We will try to keep coding as simple as possible, but we do assume that you have a basic understanding of R and your computer is setup with RStudio and R version 3.5.0 or higher.

R skills that will be useful during the course are:

  • using R as calculator incl. raising values to a power
  • being able to work with vectors and matrices, incl. subsetting and matrices multiplication
  • reading in data from .csv files, e.g. with read.delim()
  • printing top few rows or last few rows of a data frame, e.g. with head() and tail()
  • using in-built summary functions such as sum(), min() or max()
  • being able to use documentation pages for R functions, e.g. with help() or ?()
  • using if else statements, writing simple loops and functions
  • making simple scatter plots of one numerical variable against another, both with plot() and ggplot()
  • being able to install CRAN packages e.g. with install.packages()
  • being familiar with R Markdown format