My teaching is hands-on, and to follow these lessons, you must have R and RStudio installed on their computers. You also need to be able to install a number of R packages, create directories, and download files.
To avoid troubleshooting during the lessons, You should follow the instruction below to download and install (or update) everything beforehand.
R and RStudio are two separate pieces of software:
R is a programming language that is especially powerful for data exploration, visualization, and statistical analysis
RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R easier. In this course we use RStudio to interact with R.
If you don’t already have R and RStudio installed, follow the instructions for your operating system below. You have to install R before you install RStudio.
Download R from the CRAN website.
Run the .exe file that was just downloaded
Go to the RStudio download page
Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Windows Vista/7/8/10 (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
Double click the file to install it
Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
Download R from the CRAN website.
Select the .pkg file for the latest R version
Double click on the downloaded file to install R
It is also a good idea to install XQuartz (needed by some packages)
Go to the RStudio download page
Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Mac OS X 10.6+ (64-bit) (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
Double click the file to install RStudio
Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
Follow the instructions for your distribution from CRAN, they provide information to get the most recent version of R for common distributions. For most distributions, you could use your package manager (e.g., for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base, and for Fedora sudo yum install R), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this are usually out of date. In any case, make sure you have at least R 3.3.1.
Go to the RStudio download page
Under Installers select the version that matches your distribution, and install it with your preferred method (e.g., with Debian/Ubuntu sudo dpkg -i rstudio-x.yy.zzz-amd64.deb at the terminal).
Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
If you already have R and RStudio installed, check if your R and RStudio are up to date:
When you open RStudio your R version will be printed in the console on the bottom left. Alternatively, you can type sessionInfo() into the console. If your R version is 4.0.0 or later, you don’t need to update R for this lesson. If your version of R is older than that, download and install the latest version of R from the R project website for Windows, for MacOS, or for Linux
To update RStudio to the latest version, open RStudio and click on Help" > Check for updates. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, follow the instruction on screen.
Note: It is not necessary to remove old versions of R from your system, but if you wish to do so you can check here.
During the course we will need a number of R packages. Packages contain useful R code written by other people. We will use the package tidyverse.
To try to install this package, open RStudio and copy and paste the following command into the console window (look for a blinking cursor on the bottom left), then press the Enter (Windows and Linux) or Return (MacOS) to execute the command.
install.packages("tidyverse").
Alternatively, you can install the packages using RStudio’s graphical user interface by going to Tools > Install Packages and typing the names of the packages separated by a comma.
R tries to download and install the packages on your machine. When the installation has finished, you can try to load the packages by pasting the following code into the console:
library(tidyverse)
If you do not see an error, you are good to go!