This repository includes material supporting a short, two-days course in the statistical software R.
This course is for people who have often heard about R but until now have been busy to produce excuses why they haven't been able to look into this software yet. Our course is designed to overcome this initial, hindrance, to motivate them and to put them into a situation so that they can proceed alone at the end of the two days.
It is possible to work through this course remotely alone or with others or to attend a face-to-face course at SLU at Umeå. For those who have difficulties to motivate themselves when it comes to computing or who easily get stuck in technical problems we recommend the face-to-face course.
R is a programming language and software environment for carrying out computations, manipulating and analysing data and creating various types of high-quality graphs among other things. Over the past ten years R has become a standard in plant sciences and a good knowledge of this software/language can be recommended to everybody. The aim of this short course is to introduce the necessary basics to beginners. We will cover basic data structures and functions for computations and data manipulation. We will also show how to import and export data files, visualising data and obtaining summary statistics.
How to work with the files in this repository? Start reading the markdown file Rintro.md for a general introduction. We recommend using the front end RStudio. First you have to install R and then you can download RStudio from here.
Next download the the R files Basics.R, DataFrames.R, InputOutput.R, GraphsRegression.R, FunctionsFlowControl.R, ExtendingRwithC.R and open them as R scripts in RStudio. Work through these scripts line by line in the order indicated in the previous sentence. The pdf file RguideAp2017.pdf will guide you in this process. All necessary data you find in the data subfolder. At the end you can have a go with the exercises on the sheet "Exercises R for Beginners".
This R course is also part of my text book "Individual-based methods in forest ecology and management", Appendix C. In this book, you also find more examples of R applications.
Enjoy and have fun!
Questions? Direct them to arne.pommerening@slu.se.