First Things First

Go through a brute force introduction into R, R Markdown, the RStudio IDE, version management with Git and Classroom 50 to get ready for solving the upcoming assignment problems and submitting your solutions.

Your instructors must add your GitHub account to the course roster. Then follow the Classroom 50 setup steps to create your course repository.

Learning objectives

At the end of this unit you should be able to

• tell the difference between an R and an R Markdown script,
• create an R and R markdown script and run and compile it respectively,
• complete the Classroom 50 setup steps, clone your course repository to your computer and push changes back to GitHub,
• put an R markdown (or any other) file into your Git repository, commit it locally and push it to the server.

Why data analysis, why R

“Most scientific disciplines are finding the data deluge to be extremely challenging, and tremendous opportunities can be realized if we can better organize and access the data.” (Science 331, 2011)

Examples from a very large and fast growing cosmos: R-bloggers.