R Primer

Quick Start Guide for Learning R Without Any Software Installation

• Obtain a Google account if you don’t already have one; this is needed to run Google Colab. When opening each notebook, you may need to agree to run the content when prompted by Colab.
• Watch the background video and open the accompanying notebook in Colab (as listed also in Section 1.1 below) for some basic information on the R language and a list of further resources.
• Skip down below to the R Language Guide and start at Chapter 4

Learning Objectives For This R Primer

After completing this primer you should be able to do the following

• Create and manage R projects using the R console, RStudio, RStudio Cloud, Google Colab, and Jupyter Notebook
• Use the built-in help system to find details on functions, packages and data sets
• Write and evaluate expressions using variable names
• Understand name resolution and conflicts
• Use basic data structures including vectors, lists, factors and data frames, among others.
• Understand and use various control flow mechanisms, and how to replace looping structures using apply
• Write functions, understand argument lists, use named and unnamed arguments including default values
• Understand and utilize short-circuit and lazy evaluation
• Find, install and load packages from CRAN
• Read/Write basic custom data files
• Visualize data using ggplot and other plotting tools