First Things First

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

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,
• sign in to the class assignment of this course at GitHub and clone and push your course repository between the GitHub server and your local computer,
• 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.