1 Preface

Welcome to the two day Introduction to R for MSc Epi and MSc RSHR.

Before you attend the course, you will need to ensure you have your own R setup on your computer. The getting started page will instruct you how to do that. Please do this as early as possible before the course to ensure that you can get help if you encounter any issues.

How to interact with this course:

Course materials come in three flavours. First, there is the Bookdown file you are reading right now in your web browser - this contains all the code, output, exercise solutions (after the course is complete), and written explanations of how the code works. This Bookdown file is essentially a set of course notes, there for you to refer back to as you need throughout your MSc. They’re also public so you can share them with whomever you’d like, aren’t I nice?

Second, there is a set of R Notebooks that contain code (and the Bookdown annotations) for each of the five sections of the workshop. There will also be blank chunks for code for you to try the exercises we will undertake on the course. This is the set of notebooks that we’ll primarily be using while you’re in the room with me.

Finally, there is a set of R Notebooks that correspond to the above set of notebooks, but also contain solutions to the exercises. You can use these to check your work, and they will be made available after the course.

I suggest having both the Bookdown notes and the R Notebooks (without solutions) open. Read the Bookdown section first until you hit an exercise - then go to your R Notebook to complete the exercise, making your own annotations as you go along.

Throughout the two day course, we are going to cover visualising data, summarising data, tidying data, and a little bit of modelling data. We will aim to spend about 90 minutes on each of these topics, leaving two hours for a) troubleshooting and getting set up, and b) covering the topics that you as a group would like to cover.