Learning R

Quck links:

A oomplete zip file of the material in this directory is available here.

What is the R software system?

R
Rstudio

I offer several courses at various levels of R, ranging from 1 to 3 days and from introductory to advanced topics.

I can also do this or other courses onsite at your organization. Please contact me (Carl Schwarz) for information.

All slides from all levels of this course are available in this directory. The R-all-slides contains all of the slides; the other files contain subsets of the slides and subject to change.

A typical course outline at the various levels

Introduction
- R/Rstudio - mechanics of using
- Basic R syntax and concepts
- Basic input/output - read.csv(), readxl::readxl(), write.csv(), notebooks,
- Basic data structures - data.frames, vectors;
- Basic ggplot - scatterplots; bar charts; histograms; box plots; changing colors; legends; etc.
- Basic model fitting (lm), getting output (method functions), plotting (ggplot)
Intermediate
- Dealing with basic date/time data
- Simple split-apply-combine with summarize.
- Writing simple function.
Advanced
- Advanced Dealing with date and time data
- Rreshaping data from wide to long formats (primarily using the reshape2 package)
- Beyond the data frame – the list structure
- Advanced split-apply-combine – plyr, dplyr packages Packaging code into functions
- Advanced ggplot (faceting, multi-page facetting, dealing with maps)
- Introduction to generating reports (markdown, Sweave)
- Introduction to Shiny
- Introduciton to basic spatial data analysis (primarily using the sf package.
This course should not be confused with my courses on statistical methods using R. Please contact me for more details.

Sample data and code
- Sample code from the course are available in this directory.
- Sample data used in exercises from the course are available in this directory.
Email comments or suggestions to cschwarz@sfu.ca
Last updated 2025-11-01