Beginners Guide for R through Open Data Science Practices: Setup

For all operating systems

Install a good text editor

Before you start, it is handy to dispose of a jack-of-all-trades text editor.
Sublime Text is a flexible platform agnostic text editor for code and markdown syntax. For instance, it can open R scripts and markdown .md text files and color-code their languages accordingly.

  1. Go to the Sublime Text download page.
  2. Select your OS (Linux, Mac or Windows) and install it.

What needs to be installed are the R and RStudio softwares as well as related R packages. You will also have to install the version control git software. There are two different options for you to consider. Option 1 is favored.

Option 1: using RStudio Cloud

The preferred option to install all softwares and packages is to use RStudio Cloud. See this nice introduction to RStudio Cloud

Before you start

Before the training, please make sure you have done the following:

  1. Download and install up-to-date versions of:
  2. Within R/RStudio, install these packages:
    • tidyverse
    • skimr
    • plotly
    • nycflights13

To do so, open R and use the install.packages() function.

install.packages("tidyverse")
install.packages("skimr")
install.packages("plotly")
install.packages("nycflights13")