Intro to R

• Authors: Ahmed Hasan and James Santangelo
• Research field: Biology
• Lesson topic: Introduction to R (with a focus on dplyr and ggplot)
• Lesson content URL: https://github.com/utm-coders/studyGroup/tree/gh-pages/lessons/r/intro

Preface:

This is a very basic introduction to the R programming language with a particular focus on the dplyr and ggplot packages. It is based partially on openly available material from Data Carpentry and EEB313. Instead of covering more advanced statistical methods, this lesson aims to provide an understanding of fundamental data manipulation and visualiztion operations in R.

We will be working through the material together in RStudio rstudio using the R Notebook r-notebook file format. To use RStudio, you will also have to download standalone R here.

Please make sure to have dplyr, readr, knitr, and ggplot2 installed:

install.packages('dplyr')
install.packages('readr')
install.packages('knitr')
install.packages('ggplot2')

To install dplyr, readr, and ggplot2 all at once alongside other useful R packages:

install.packages('tidyverse')

Lesson Overview:

The lesson covers:

• The R/RStudio interface and R Notebooks
• Objects and functions
• Data frames
• The dplyr package
• Reading and writing files in R
• Introductory plotting with ggplot2
• Knitting Rmd files