Overview

The purpose of this course is to provide a practical introduction to the programming language R for researchers in any field. We are convinced that R is a powerful tool that can ultimately make your life easier by enabling efficient solutions to your data analytical problems. Also, R is completely free. Who doesn't like that?

This course aims to facilitate the participant's first steps in R and equip them with the tools and understanding to expand their technical know-how according to the needs of their specific research. It is neither a computer science nor a methodological course, but aimed at the practical needs of empirically working researchers.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course students you shall be confident and equipped with all the knowledge required to perform analytical activities in R. Specifically,

• Understand the fundamental syntax of R through readings, practice exercises, demonstrations, and writing R code.
• Apply critical programming language concepts such as data types, iteration, control structures, functions, and boolean operators by writing R programs and through examples
• Import a variety of data formats into R using RStudio
• Prepare or tidy data for in preparation for analysis
• Query data using SQL and R
• Analyze a data set in R and present findings using the appropriate R packages
• Visualize data attributes using ggplot2 and other R packages.