R course - The Basics

1. Concept

This seminar addresses everybody who is interested in learning R from scratch.

This workshop is also intended as a preparation for the advanced modules and courses in applied statistics and data analysis as well as data visualisation, which require some scripting skills.

There will be

a little theory
focus on technical aspects (not on interpretation)
time for questions and answers
hands-on training based on the requests you write in the comment field of the registration form. Feel free to approach us with your data

2. Organizational issues

Instructors: Guido Kraemer
Date: April 3-7, 2017
Time: 9.00 am - noon
Place: Seminar room B0.002 (MPI-BGC)
Slides: Material (zip file)

3. Content of the course

Day	Content
Monday, April 3	Intro
	Rstudio and R as a calculator Data types Data structures Reading and writing files Navigating the R universe
Tuesday, April 4	Programming
	Control flow: Loops Conditions Functions Processing of character strings
Wednesday, April 5	Graphics
	High and low level graphics functions From data sets to plots Other graphics packages
Thursday, April 6	Data Analysis
	Simple statistics Uni-variate descriptive statistics Data processing Outlook: Where to find a method? Other ways to process data.
Friday, April 7	Free Practice
	Find your own mini-project Repeat stuff from the course Ask for help with own data analysis

4. What you need to prepare

Bring a laptop and make sure that a recent version of R and R Studio is running on it.

You can download the most recent version here: http://www.r-project.org/
RStudio is a new open-source integrated development environment that runs on all platforms. It nicely combines console, script editor, working directory, plots etc. into a an uncluttered layout that you can easily navigate. You need to have R installed before you can use RStudio as a development environment.

Please also make sure that you can access the internet via WLAN (BGC-users, if you have a BGC-account; BGC-guests, if you don't have an account)