Introducing learningR

learningR: An introduction to R

The repository is used for an introductory course to scientific programming and data visualisation with R.

Installation

The package is a GitHub-only package at this stage. To avoid the overhead of installing the devtools package which is usually used for installing packages directly from GitHub (using devtools::install_github()), I recommend using remotes::install_github(). Indeed, devtools only re-exports the original function of the remotes package.

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("ablaette/learningR", build_vignettes = TRUE, dependencies = TRUE)

Setting arguments build_vignettes and dependencies as TRUE is important:

The slides included in the package are technically realized as vignettes. We need to ensure that they are built (build_vignettes = TRUE).
R packages used by the vignettes are suggested packages, dependencies = TRUE will ensure that these dependencies are installed if not yet present.

This installation mechanism works on macOS, Linux and Windows.

Experimentally, the package is also available via a “drat” (CRAN-style) repository. Install the package as follows:

install.packages(pkg = "learningR", repos = "https://polmine.github.io/drat/")

Using the package

Viewing the slides

The slides are designed to work online as well as locally. If the learningR package is installed, use the following command to open a browser window that will show an overview over the slides within the package.

browseVignettes(package = "learningR")

Then click on the respective HTML document to inspect one set of slides.

Viewing R Markdown

To explore code included in the slides, you want to have access to the original R code. Within RStudio, choose among the R Markdown files the slides are based on using the following command.

open_rmd_file()

The chosen file will be opened in RStudio.

Classroom use

The slides are designed to work well in a classroom setting - including courses taught by video conference. In this scenario, you often want to show slides and the R console at the same time, to demonstrate how a piece of code works.

This is why we use xaringan Presentations: You can preview (show) slides within the Viewer pane of RStudio. At the same, the R console is available. To launch the ‘infinite moon reader’, ensure that the R Markdown document of the slides you want to use is the active document. The slides are launched in the RStudio Viewer pane as follows:

servr::daemon_stop(1)
xaringan::inf_mr()

Finding the slides online

The package is work in progress, only a part of the slides is ready for use. The following slides are available online:

License

The package is an Open Educational Resource licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY 4.0). Tha package may be used, shared and modified, but it is expected that authorship is attributed.

Quoting the slides (the package)

To get a suggestion how to quote the package, use the citation() function:

citation(package = "learningR")

## 
## To cite package 'learningR' in publications use:
## 
##   Blaette, Andreas (2020). learningR. R package version v0.0.2.
## 
## A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
## 
##   @Manual{,
##     title = {learningR},
##     author = {Andreas Blaette},
##     year = {2021},
##     note = {R package version 0.0.2},
##   }