Intro to R — Data Science Platform, Garvan Institute
For Students
This course is an introduction to R and RStudio for researchers with no prior programming experience. By the end of the course you will be able to:
- Navigate the RStudio interface and set up a project
- Understand the core data types and structures in R
- Load, explore, and manipulate tabular data
- Produce publication-quality plots using ggplot2
Course Contents
- 1 - Setup of R and RStudio — Installing R and RStudio, navigating the interface, creating a project, and writing your first lines of code
- 2 - Understanding Data Types — Variables, data types, vectors, lists, and matrices
- 3 - Dealing with Data Frames — Loading and exploring dataframes, indexing, and subsetting
- 4 - Data Manipulation — Filtering, selecting, and transforming data using dplyr
- 5 - Data Visualisation — Creating and customising plots using ggplot2, and integrating basic statistical tests
- Extras 1 - Advanced ggplot2 — Further visualisation topics for those who finish early or want to go further
- Extras 2 - Automation in R — For loops and apply functions for repeating operations across data
For Trainers
This repository contains the source files for the Intro to R course website, maintained by the Data Science Platform.
Repository Structure
- content/ — one markdown file per section of the course
- data/ — input data files used during the session
- _config.yml — site settings including the navigation bar; update this when adding or renaming content pages
- photos/ and img/ — images used throughout the course material
Making Edits
- Create a new branch before making changes — do not edit directly on gh-pages
- Edit markdown files in a plain text editor or RStudio Source mode (not Visual mode, as this reformats HTML)
- Push your branch and open a pull request for review before merging into gh-pages
- The live website updates automatically once changes are merged into gh-pages
Adding a New Section
- Add a new markdown file to content/ following the existing naming convention
- Add a corresponding entry to the navbar-links section of _config.yml
- Add any data files needed to data/