Overview
R is an open-source programming language designed for Data Analysis and Statistical Analysis from the outset. If your organisation is using R, you’ll find this a useful introduction to get you started.
This course is designed to introduce complete beginners to R and RStudio. It stops short of using R to analyse data, instead the focus is on laying a good foundation of programming skills to move forward with.
What you’ll need
- Laptop (minimum 16 GB RAM is recommended)
- headphones and microphone
- Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
- Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge
- R version 4.4.3 or later
- RStudio (any version from 2025 or later)
Learning outcomes
Attendees will be able to:
- work independently to build simple programs using traditional programming staples such as conditional statements and loops
- debug programs using RStudio by setting breakpoints, and stepping through their code.
- be aware of different types of errors and how to fix them.
Course topics
- An introduction to the R Programming language
- Installing R and RStudio
- Writing your first program in R
- R Fundamentals (variables, and types)
- Branching with Conditional Statements (if, else if, else)
- Executing code line by line
- Debugging a program in RStudio- stepping through your code
- Loops
- Functions
- Collection objects in R (e.g. Vectors, Factors and matrices)
- Importing packages from the CRAN repository
- Workshop: Solving problems by writing R programs