About
The best way to learn how to program is to do something useful, so this introduction to R is built around a common scientific task: data analysis.
Our real goal isn’t to teach you R, but to teach you the basic concepts that all programming depends on. We use R in our lessons because:
- it’s free, well-documented, and runs almost everywhere;
- it has a large (and growing) user base among scientists;
- and
it has a large library of external packages available for performing diverse tasks.
The goal of this lesson is to teach novice programmers to write modular code and best practices for using R for data analysis. R is commonly used in many scientific disciplines for statistical analysis and its array of third-party packages. Note that this workshop will focus on teaching the fundamentals of the programming language R, and will not teach statistical analysis.