Previous steps

If you would like to return to information from the previous session, please click [here]((Knowledge-management-and-version-control.html).

Context

By now, you should have already installed R onto your computer and R Studio. For version control, we also need to install git.

There are some individual R packages that we will need to install. These provide the base functionality for data manipulation, visualisation and reporting for this training course.

This wiki page provides some background to the various components of R and R Studio and some base instruction on how to call packages from our library() to get ready for working on the data project itself.

Basic Set up

For people new to R, the interface can be somewhat intimidating. Part of this has to do with the modular design of R, where there is a separation of code in the editor and the console, which basically brings the code “to life”. In R Studio there is also a number of tabs that allow users to see files, plots (i.e. output), objects in the environment, et cetera:

In R Studio, there are also a number of menus and buttons that allow users to access routine functions, similar to Excel or other software packages.

If you are using the stand-alone R application, this can be somewhat more confronting:

As there are few buttons or any really instructions on “what to do”.

And, for the more extreme, starting R in a terminal window is even more stark:

…with no buttons or anything obvious “to do”.

For this training course, we will be working with a mixed model with the idea that course participants become familiar with different ways to code and interact with R. Most users will find R Studio provides a suitable platform for coding, keeping track of the workspace environment, and graphical outputs.

However, the design of a data integration project should be independent of the platform and the elegance of running base R in a terminal should not be ignored.

Next steps

Now that we have the basic setup for R, we can create a copy of the project repository.