R Bootcamp - Day 1

R & RStudio overview

RStudio - Exercise 1

• We are using RStudio through Posit Cloud for the class.
• Look at RStudio panels one at a time.
• Environment, History, Console, Files, Plots, Packages, Help, etc.

See menu:

Help > Cheat Sheets > RStudio IDE Cheat Sheet

R as a calculator - Exercise 2

• R can function like an advanced calculator

---

Try simple math.

Assign a numeric value to an object.

• <- and = are assignment operators.
• By convention, R programmers use <-.
• x <- 1 reads “set the value of x to 1”.

. . .

= and == are two different operators.

• a = is used for assignment (e.g., x = 1)

• a == tests for equivalence (e.g. x == 1 says “does x equal 1?”)

Functions and arguments - Exercise 3

Writing a simple function - Exercise 4

Data types - Exercise 5

• There are many data types in R.
• We’ll mainly use numeric, character, and logical.

Vectors - Exercise 6

Let’s create some vectors.

• The c function combines values together (e.g., c(1,2,3))

. . .

Data frames

• A data.frame is a rectangle, where each column is a vector, and each row is a slice across vectors.

• data.frame columns are vectors, and can have different types (numeric, character, factor, etc.).

• A data.frame is constructed with data.frame().

Data frames & tibbles - Exercise 7

Create a data.frame and tibble.

Now echo the contents of df and tbl to the console and inspect

R packages - Exercise 8

Let’s do the following to explore R packages:

• Look at the “Environment” panel in Rstudio
• Explore Global Environment
• Explore the contents of a package

Quarto Exercise - Exercise 9

Let’s do the following to explore Quarto documents:

• Create a new Quarto document
• Render the document to see the output

Problem sets and submission

Your first problem set is in problem-sets/ps-01.qmd