Series of beginning workshops for Northwestern R Users.
These introductory workshops are designed to help you get familiar with the core concepts and functions in R. You'll learn the basics that will help you use R in your research and provide a foundation for further learning in the future. This series assumes no prior knowledge of R.
This workshop series is designed for beginners with limited or no prior programming experience; however, we strongly recommend you also register for the Programming Concepts workshop if you are unfamiliar with any of the following terms: working directory, vector, boolean, string, list index, function, or any of the other content covered in the Programming Concepts workshop.
These workshops will only get you started. Learning R takes practice and more than a few hours of workshops. This repository has links to other online resources that supplement what we cover in the workshops.
If this workshop does not fit with your schedule, or you have significant experience with other programming languages, you may want to use our recommended resources for learning R on your own instead. Request a consultation if you'd like help finding a course or book that fits your needs.
Install R and RStudio on your own laptop (both are free). If you can't install these programs or run into issues installing packages, RStudio Cloud is a good option.
Also, install the tidyverse package. Instructions are at the bottom of the installation instructions page. If you run into installation issues, plan to stick around on Zoom after the first session to ask question, or request a consultation.
Download this repository (but wait until a few days before the workshop starts to make sure you get the most up-to-date materials)
Then you will have the datasets and exercises downloaded to your computer to work on. Open the r-intro-series.Rproj file in the project directory to make sure your working directory is set correctly for the scripts.
During in-person workshops, these are the handouts we usually provide. You may find them useful to have available as you work.
RStudio Cheat Sheets are short pdfs that summarize key R functions on specific topics. Many people print them out for reference while working in R. The ggplot2 cheat sheet, in particular, is indispensable when working with that package.
R Reference Card: lists many commonly used functions, so that you can find what you're looking for, since the R help is most useful when you already know the function name you want.
You may be interested in our recommended resources for learning R on your own.
You can get free help with R and other data and programming issues from Research Computing Services.
You could work through our R Tidyverse Workshop materials on your own, or sign up for that series of workshops. Workshops are announced on our listserv and are posted on our training page.
For the workshops, you'll want to download this repository to get all of the files needed. But if you want to just view the files:
These are lessons from previous versions of this workshop that we're not currently covering. Visualization with ggplot2 is taught as a separate workshop.