A Friendly Intro to R - BioData Club

Before we begin

• Download R - this is the binary containing R language stuff - it comes with a basic interface, but we won’t use it. You need to download this first so your computer will know what to do with R Studio.
  • https://cran.rstudio.com/
• Download R Studio - this is an interface that makes it easy to work with R.
  • https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download3/
• Go to our Github page:
  • https://github.com/BioData-Club/Friendly-Intro-to-R
• Click on “Clone or Download”
• Click on “Download Zip”

Why should you use R??

• Free!
  • unlike Prism, excel
• Open Source
  • Tons of support, packages, tools
  • Don’t trap your file in proprietary format!
• Great for stats
  • Defaults not hidden, question assumptions

Basics (1)

• use # to comment
• “<-” assigns values to a variable

x<-1
x

## [1] 1

• = assigns a value ( x = 5)
• == assigns equality (a == b)
• functions ()

print(x)

## [1] 1

Basics (2)

• help() and ?
• in R console, use up arrow to re-type what you just wrote
• variable names can’t start with a number
  • eg Data1 not 1Data
• throwing errors is normal! You will create errors a lot
• when you need to install package:
  • install.packages(“png”)

R is stupid and only knows what you input

This is what R Studio looks like:

Resources

• CRAN: https://cran.r-project.org
• http://stackoverflow.com - like google for coding questions
• R Markdown cheat sheets (rmarkdown.rstudio.com)
• Ted Laderas’ R bootcamp: https://github.com/laderast/r-bootcamp
• Mozilla study groups: https://github.com/mozillascience/studyGroupLessons/issues
• R Open Sci (https://ropensci.org)
• R meetup groups (https://www.meetup.com/portland-r-user-group/)
• additional plotting abilities with ggplot package (we’re not going into this)

Fun Events: cascadiarconf.com

Fun Events: Science Hack Day PDX!

• http://portland.sciencehackday.org/
• Join us on Slack! pdxscience.slack.com

Fun Events: BioData Club

• https://biodata-club.github.io/
• Join us on Slack! biodata-club.slack.com

Let’s go!

From the Github downloaded files, open:

• “example_lengths_for_R.csv”
• “BasicStatsCode.pdf”

We’ll start with “BasicStatsCode.pdf”

PLEASE ASK US IF YOU ARE CONFUSED! :-)

Use your yellow sticky note for “confused” and green for “ok”