This week I held the second introductory seminar on R, and I think it went pretty well — though I guess you really should ask my colleagues if you want to know. The first seminar was a lecture, and this seminar was a tutorial where we made some plots and calculated a few of the usual statistics. Of course the only real way to learn R is to play with it, but I hope this couple of hours provided a decent opening to getting started with R.

I actually think RStudio made it quite a bit easier. One important thing that I certainly should’ve stressed more, though, is organising code into scripts. I mentioned it in the first seminar, but I should have included it into the exercise. Maybe the first section should be something like ”Start a new script file for your analysis: Select File > New > R script to open the editor area. Save the script as unicorn_analysis.R, and for the rest of the tutorial, write your code in that window.”

Files from the seminar:

Slides about common statistical functions in R (again, ugly walls of text meant more as notes for future reference than actual slides)

Exercises for the tutorial and the associated dataset

My suggested solutions to the exercises