This repository contains presentations, exercises, and the corresponding solutions to make programming with R easier for people with no previous knowledge. Initially, the presentations were prepared for a 1.5-day boot camp for incoming students of the Master in Comparative and International Studies (see MACIS) and the Master in Science, Technology, and Policy (see MSc ETH STP), respectively. In the spirit of reproducibility and the open-source movement, we decided to make this repository publicly available to all those who want to acquire basic knowledge of R themselves or teach it to others as instructors. Finally, we have recorded all the presentations to help both students and teachers to familiarise themselves more easily with the contents of the boot camp. The recordings can be found by clicking here.
The course is divided into three parts:
| Part 1 : Introduction to Base R |
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| Motivation – the role of R in the scope of the study programs |
| R – a language for statistical computing and data analysis |
| Console – assign variables and conduct simple calculations |
| The script – helps you, your friends, and colleagues to understand your code |
| Data structure – classes, data types and indexing |
| Your first data visualisations in R |
| Exercises |
Part 2 : Introduction to the Tidyverse and dplyr |
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| Tidyverse – welcome to the tidy philosophy of R |
| Tidyverse vs Base-R – two complementing approaches |
The pipe - %>% |
dplyr – introduction to its essential verbs |
Part 3 : Introduction to ggplot2 and final exercise |
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ggplot2 - modern data visualisation in R |
| Final exercise |
According to the three parts, the original timetable foresees one half-day block per part. It is up to the instructors to decide how they want to further subdivide these blocks. Either theoretical inputs regularly alternate with practical applications or theory is presented in a single session, followed by exercises. We have had good experience with both approaches.
All presentations and exercises were created in our free time, and we have not received any financial or other support in return. In the open-source movement spirit, we don't want to charge anything for these resources, but if you use them, we would like to ask you to give us the credits for them.
For further information, please contact the following e-mail address: colin.walder@ir.gess.ethz.ch
Best,
Mirjam, Felix, Johann, and Colin
Student Representatives of MACIS and STP