Preparing your machine for the course

Dear all,

Chances are that you aim to prepare yourself for an R course. These exercises will help you to master the basic scripting skills required for a succesfull programming career in R. The exercises usually prepare you well for any introductory course into R.

If you run into trouble, please drop me a line.

All the best,

Gerko Vink

System requirements

You will need a laptop or desktop computer with full write access and administrator rights to the machine. We will explore programming and compiling in these exercises. This means that you need full access to your machine. Some corporate laptops (including Dutch university laptops) come with limited access for their users. I therefore advice you to bring a personal laptop computer, if you have one.

1. Install R

R can be obtained here. We won’t use R directly in the course, but rather call R through RStudio. Therefore it needs to be installed.

2. Install RStudio Desktop

Rstudio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It can be obtained as stand-alone software here. The free and open source RStudio Desktop version is sufficient.

3. Start RStudio and install the following packages.

Execute the following lines of code in the console window:

install.packages(c("ggplot2", "tidyverse", "magrittr", "micemd", "jomo", "pan", 
                 "lme4", "knitr", "rmarkdown", "plotly", "ggplot2", "shiny", 
                 "devtools", "boot", "class", "car", "MASS", "ggplot2movies", 
                 "ISLR", "DAAG", "mice", "mitml", "miceadds"), 
                 dependencies = TRUE)

If you are not sure where to execute code, use the following figure to identify the console:

Just copy and paste the installation command and press the return key. When asked

Do you want to install from sources the package which needs 
compilation? (Yes/no/cancel)

type Yes in the console and press the return key.

What if the steps to the left do not work for me?

If all fails and you have insufficient rights to your machine, the following web-based service will offer a solution.

1. Open a free account on rstudio.cloud. You can run your own cloud-based RStudio environment there.

Naturally, you will need internet access for these services to be accessed.

R exercises

The introductory R exercise is threefold. We need to cover a lot of ground in these exercises to get you started with R.

• Make Exercise 1. This exercise will get you started with R and RStudio.
• Make Exercise 2. You can find boys.RData here.
• Make Exercise 3.

Exercise discussion

The below videodiscussions for the practical exercises explain the train of thought in the above exercise documents.

• Exercise 1 discussion
• Exercise 2 discussion
• Exercise 3 discussion

If you have any questions

Please do not hesitate to contact me, if you have questions.

All the best,

Gerko