Introduction to R Workshop organized by the CCB with support from the Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core.

This is an asynchronous workshop with synchronous support which will introduce participants to using R and RStudio. R is a simple programming environment that enables the effective handling of data, while providing excellent graphical support. RStudio is a tool that provides a user-friendly environment for working with R.

Participants can expect the workshop to take 3-4 hours per week for 3 weeks. Most of the workshop will be asynchronous, but we will provide office hours, scheduled problem sessions, a Q&A forum, and feedback on weekly coding exercises to support your work throughout.

This workshop has been adapted from the Harvard Chan Bioinformatics Core’s Intro to R workshop.

This workshop is intended to provide basic R programming knowledge. Participants should be interested in:

• learning the basics of R for reproducible data wrangling and visualizations (ggplot2)
• performing data analyses requiring a basic knowledge of R

Participants will learn about:

• R syntax: Understanding the different ‘parts of speech’ in R; introducing variables and functions, demonstrating how functions work, and modifying arguments for specific use cases.
• Data structures in R: Getting a handle on the classes of data structures and the types of data used by R.
• Data inspection and wrangling: Reading in data from files. Using indices and various functions to subset and create datasets, including the tidyverse suite of packages.
• Visualizing data: Visualizing data using plotting functions from the external package ggplot2.
• Exporting data and graphics: Generating new data tables and plots for use outside of the R environment.

In addition to the above, we will focus on good data management practices, installing and working with data wrangling and visualization packages, and the different ways to get help when coding in R. After this workshop participants can expect to be comfortable with the basics of data wrangling and plotting using R.

This workshop has NO prerequisites and no prior programming experience is required.

Please register for this workshop here.