Working environment

For this course, we do not provide a mandatory template for your working environment. However it is a good idea to have something like this:

• a top level folder for this course, e.g. “some-path-to-your-data-disk\ground_radar”,
• a data folder within your top level folder which also contains a temp folder for temporary files and a raw folder for raw data files,
• a scripts folder for your personal scripts, and
• an output folder for processed data output.

Hence, your data structure could look like this:

<some-path-to-your-data-disk>\ground_radar
  |-- data
    |-- raw
    |-- temp
  |-- scripts
    |-- R
    |-- other
  |-- output
    |-- final
    |-- test
  |  

Do not use any spaces within your folder or filenames until you become an expert. At no time. Never.

Be aware that a proper organization of the data is the basis for re-use of your data and code as well as for the reproducibility of your analysis. See this R-bloggers contribution by Matt.0 and references therein on the “gold standard” of data science project management (although there might not be such a thing as one gold standard).

Also do not miss to check out our material on setting up a work environment an installing packages in our accompanying Base R course.