Session 0: Basics

Understanding of this material will be assumed throughout the course. Please read these introductory materials and make sure you understand them before beginning the readings for the first session.

If there is sufficient interest, a short primer on using R will be offered during the first week of the course (somewhere between May 26 and May 30). If you're interested in this, or if you have requests on what to cover during the primer, please write to AustinFrank.

Reading

Assignments

• Make sure you have the latest version of R (version 2.7) installed on a laptop that you can use during class.

Topics

Interacting with R and R files

• Using a command line
  • command history, continuation lines, stopping execution defining variables calling functions
• Installing packages

  • install.package(), update.package()

• Using the R workspace

  • ls(), rm(), setwd(), getwd(), library()

• Using an R script file
• Saving R objects

  • save(), save.image()

Getting help

• Function-specific help

  • ?(), help()

• Searching the help

  • apropos(), help.search(), RSiteSearch()

Loading data

• general purpose functions

  • scan()

• specific formats

  • read.csv(), read.delim(), library(foreign)

General data structures

• vectors / arrays

  • c()

• matrices

  • cbind(), rbind(), table()

• lists

  • list(), unlist()

• data frames

  • data.frame()

• general structure manipulation and interaction

  • [], [[]], $, subset(), str(), cut(), repr()

Basic descriptive statistics

• summary stats

  • mean(), sd(), var(), quantile()

Probability distributions

• random sampling

  • runif(), rnorm(), rbinom()