Session 0: Basics (with optional R primer)

11:00, May 27 2008

This optional meeting of the course will be an R primer. We'll be focusing on obtaining a basic level of familiarity required to participate in the course. We won't cover everything you'll need to know for the course, but hopefully we'll cover enough that you will be able to learn new material on your own.

Whether you attend the R primer or not, you are responsible for understanding the content of these readings before the first session.

If there are things you would like to cover, please make note of them below. NB: as of now there are no plans to teach graphing functions during the primer. It's possible that we could have a special add-on session to discuss different graphics packages in R if there's sufficient interest. Let AustinFrank know if you want to participate in such an event.

Reading

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. Here and for the other sessions, we sometimes assign parts of chapters for reading, so please check the page numbers for the suggested readings (or risk being confused).

Baa08	Chapter 1 (pp. 1-20)	Intro to R.
G&H07	Chapter 2 (pp. 13-26)	Intro to probability theory.
Dal04	Chapter 2 (pp. 45-55)	Probability distributions in R

For absolute beginners, this is also very useful:

Dal04	Chapter 1.1 - 1.2	Basics of R
	Chapter 1.5 - 1.5

Assignments

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

R Primer

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()