An Introduction to R
These tutorials are designed to prepare students for the R-intensive lab assignments used in GEOSCIENCE 541: Paleobiology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The repository was created and is maintained by Andrew A. Zaffos.
Importantly, these tutorials largely focus on the core programming and computer science principles underlying the R language, and do not focus on data analysis (i.e., statistics). Although basic statistical concepts are introduced in the expertConcepts tutorial, the majority of data analysis principles are instead presented throughout the course in other lab assignments.
Table of Contents
- How to install R
- Beginner Concepts
- Beginner Test
- Intermediate Concepts
- Intermediate Test
- Advanced Concepts
- Advanced Test
- Expert Concepts
- Expert Test
- Other R Tutorials and Resources
- Acknowledgements
How to install R
The home page for R is http://www.r-project.org. You can download the installation file by clicking on the homepage and finding the download R link.
Other R Tutorials and Resources
As with most things, there are a variety of ways to teach R - particularly to beginners. If there is any section of these tutorials that you find confusing or insufficienty detailed, the internet is rife with other resources for learning R. I encourage you to explore these if you need help completing the exercises in this repository.
| Resource | Description |
|---|---|
| Kelly Black | A good R tutorial, but be warned that it splits its attention between R programming principles and statistics. |
| Steve Holland | Another good R tutorial that also covers basic plotting principles, which are not covered here. |
| David Bapst | Another good R tutorial that covers many of the same topics discussed here with some plotting aspects thrown in. |
| Mark Graph | A google document of some "cheat sheets" for remembering common funcitons and basic concepts. Very concise, very helpful. |
| Hadley Wickham | This is an excellent resource that largely focuses on the programming side of R. As its name, advanced R, implies, the tutorial is meant for more advanced users. |
| Stack Overflow | Stack Overflow is the de facto forum for R (and other language) questions. The community is easily irritated by questions from beginners, so it behooves you to search through the forums to see if your question has already been answered. |
| Quick R | One of the most user-friendly services, but not very in depth. |
| Sublime Text | Sublime Text is a text editing software. |
| Visual Studio Code | An even better text editing software with built in GitHub support. |
Acknowledgements
This tutorial and all of its publically available content is funded by the University of Wisconsin - Madison and the National Science Foundation as part of the NSF Geoinformatics grant 0949416 (supplement) initiative for enhancing geoscience education.