Summary and Setup

This is a new lesson built with The Carpentries Workbench.

In order to follow this lesson you will require 2 things: R and RStudio. R is the actual programming language. It translates the commands you write into something your computer can understand. RStudio is just a shiny new hood on R. It is more user-friendly and provides some useful tools to write and organize R code. We will learn more about these tools during the course.

For now, it is important that you download both of these tools:

Software Setup

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R

To download R, go to CRAN, the comprehensive R archive network, https://cloud.r-project.org. A new major version of R comes out once a year, and there are 2-3 minor releases each year. It’s a good idea to update regularly. Upgrading can be a bit of a hassle, especially for major versions that require you to re-install all your packages, but putting it off only makes it worse. I recommend you download the latest version of R (currently R-4.4.2).

RStudio

RStudio is an integrated development environment, or IDE, for R programming, which you can download from https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/. RStudio is updated a couple of times a year, and it will automatically let you know when a new version is out, so there’s no need to check back. It’s a good idea to upgrade regularly to take advantage of the latest and greatest features.

When you start RStudio, you’ll see two key regions in the interface: the console pane and the output pane. For now, all you need to know is that you type the R code in the console pane and press enter to run it. You’ll learn more as we go along!

Data

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We will make use of some data available in R packages as well as data from real experiments run by me or my colleagues.

I will provide the data you need at each time point, you can then easily download the required data. If you want to download all data beforehand, download the data zip file and unzip it to your desktop.