Exposure to R

Pre-Assignment

This page describes both components of the R Exposure course you are expected to complete prior to the first lecture (or as soon as possible). You have two tasks:

1. Install R and RStudio
2. Complete two interactive R tutorials

Installing R and RStudio

To install R and RStudio, follow the instructions found here. If you have any difficulty, do not hesitate to email me. If you wish to compile R packages (it is fine to have no idea what that means!) you can follow these steps as well.

swirl

swirl is an R package for running interactive tutorials in R itself. These tutorials will give you a guided introduction to R while familiarizing you with your own installation of R. There are many lessons available in swirl, but I just ask that you complete the first two units of swirl’s R Programming introduction. You can see instructions to do this here, which I’ve replicated below. In your RStudio console (the bottom panel), enter the following commands–enter the entire line of code, then press enter:

install.packages("swirl")
library(swirl)
install_course("R Programming")
swirl()

From there, follow the instructions in the console and complete 1: Basic Building Blocks and 2: Workspace and Files. Do more if you’d like–it will give you a jump at some of our lecture material. Again, email me if you have any difficulty. Note that while you are using swirl it will “take over” your R console. If you need to close swirl, type bye() into the console and hit Enter.