2 Pre-workshop

2.1 Installation

R and RStudio are separate downloads and installations. R is the underlying statistical computing environment and RStudio is a graphical integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R much easier and more interactive. You will need to install R before you install RStudio.

If you already have R and RStudio installed, open RStudio and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio and download the latest version of RStudio. To check which version of R you are using, start RStudio and check the top of the console to see which version of R you are running. Alternatively, you can type sessionInfo(), which will also display the version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, please download and install it.

If you don’t have R and RStudio installed, please follow the instructions for your operating system below.

2.1.1 Windows

  • Download R from the CRAN website.
  • Run the .exe file that was just downloaded
  • Go to the RStudio download page
  • Under Installers select RStudio for Windows
  • 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.

2.1.2 MacOS

  • 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 for MacOS
  • 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.

2.1.3 Linux

  • 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and for Fedora sudo yum install R), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this are usually out of date.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.

2.2 Datacamp Courses

To help familiarize yourself with R, you have been assigned two Datacamp courses to be completed prior to the workshop:

  • Introduction to R
  • Introduction to the Tidyverse

Please do your best to have these courses completed by the start of the workshop.