Intro to Practical Computing in R

Readings

Readings for Tuesday September 29th

I encourage you to enter some of his demonstrations in R.

Here are some questions to help focus your reading:

  1. What are the three subsetting operators?

  2. What is a vector?

  3. What types of vectors are there (you have already seen at least three of these)?

  4. What are 5 different data types (ignore the S3/S4 stuff)?

  5. If this was enough, you can stop at the Subsetting and Assignment heading.

Readings for Tuesday September 29th

  • Read through and try out this online dplyr tutorial - it will clarify what we did in class.

  • For those who are itching for more readings, feel free to also look over The split-apply-combine strategy for data analysis. Although it refers to a package plyr that has been superceded by Hadley’s dplyr package, the fundamental approach and description of data analysis remains the same.

Readings for Thursday, Sept 17

Coding style matters, it makes your code more readable–a benefit to both future you and your colleagues. Read through both of these style guides. They are very similar, but you can choose to use the conventions of either. Just make sure you work on consistency.

Skim over this. It is definitely worth the read. Skim it now, but come back to it throughout the semester because you will learn more and more each time you look at it. This page is just one section, there are three others: Atomic vectors, Factors, and Data frames. Feel free to skim over these sections for ‘gotchas’ that you will come across. We will however, read these as we cover these topics in class.

Last, read this git cheatsheet. The first page is a good reference for commands, while the second page covers best practices that we touched on in class. Again, remind yourself of these periodically!