Data Carpentry’s aim is to teach researchers basic concepts, skills, and tools for working with data so that they can get more done in less time, and with less pain. The lessons below were designed for those interested in working with ecology data in R.

This is an introduction to R designed for participants with no programming experience. These lessons can be taught in a day (~ 6 hours). They start with some basic information about R syntax, the RStudio interface, and move through how to import CSV files, the structure of data frames, how to deal with factors, how to add/remove rows and columns, how to calculate summary statistics from a data frame, and a brief introduction to plotting. The last lesson demonstrates how to work with databases directly from R.

Requirements

Data Carpentry’s teaching is hands-on, so participants are encouraged to use their own computers to ensure the proper setup of tools for an efficient workflow. These lessons assume no prior knowledge of the skills or tools, but working through this lesson requires working copies of the software described below. To most effectively use these materials, please make sure to download the data and install everything before working through this lesson.

Data

Data files for the lesson are available and can be downloaded manually here:

However, we will download them directly from R during the lessons when we need them.

Setup instructions

R and RStudio are separate downloads and installations. R is the underlying statistical computing environment, but using R alone is no fun. RStudio is a graphical integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R much easier and more interactive. You need to install R before you install RStudio. After installing both programs, you will need to install the tidyverse package from within RStudio. Follow the instructions below for your operating system, and then follow the instructions to install tidyverse and RSQLite.

Windows

If you already have R and RStudio installed
  • Open RStudio, and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, and download the latest version for RStudio.
  • To check which version of R you are using, start RStudio and the first thing that appears in the console indicates the version of R you are running. Alternatively, you can type sessionInfo(), which will also display which version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, please download and install it. You can check here for more information on how to remove old versions from your system if you wish to do so.
If you don’t have R and RStudio installed
  • Download R from the CRAN website.
  • Run the .exe file that was just downloaded
  • Go to the RStudio download page
  • Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Windows XP/Vista/7/8 (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
  • Double click the file to install it
  • Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

macOS

If you already have R and RStudio installed
  • Open RStudio, and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, and download the latest version for RStudio.
  • To check the version of R you are using, start RStudio and the first thing that appears on the terminal indicates the version of R you are running. Alternatively, you can type sessionInfo(), which will also display which version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, please download and install it.
If you don’t have R and RStudio installed
  • Download R from the CRAN website.
  • Select the .pkg file for the latest R version
  • Double click on the downloaded file to install R
  • It is also a good idea to install XQuartz (needed by some packages)
  • Go to the RStudio download page
  • Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Mac OS X 10.6+ (64-bit) (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
  • Double click the file to install RStudio
  • Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

Linux

  • Follow the instructions for your distribution from CRAN, they provide information to get the most recent version of R for common distributions. For most distributions, you could use your package manager (e.g., for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base, and for Fedora sudo yum install R), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this are usually out of date. In any case, make sure you have at least R 3.3.1.
  • Go to the RStudio download page
  • Under Installers select the version that matches your distribution, and install it with your preferred method (e.g., with Debian/Ubuntu sudo dpkg -i rstudio-x.yy.zzz-amd64.deb at the terminal).
  • Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

For everyone

After installing R and RStudio, you need to install the tidyverse and RSQLite packages.

  • After starting RStudio, at the console type: install.packages(c("tidyverse", "RSQLite"))

Contributors

The list of contributors to this lesson is available here,

Data Carpentry, 2017. License. Contributing.
Questions? Feedback? Please file an issue on GitHub.
On Twitter: @datacarpentry