Course Outline
R for Biologists
H. Christoph Liedtke
Biological Station Doñana - CSIC2023-12-08
# set working directory
setwd("~/Documents/git_projects/RforBiologists/")What is R and why learn it?
R is programming language geared towards (but not exclusively for) statistics. However, it has evolved to be much more and as Biologists, there are many reasons to learn it:
- It is open source (and free!)
- There is an expansive community and lots of help!
- It is cross-platform (windows, linux, mac)
- It is object-oriented and intuitive
- It is always evolving
- It is a one-stop-shop: libraries for many different types of analyses
- It is widely used, even outside academia and one of the most popular languages for data science
- it allows reproducibility: This is extremely important in science.
What can I expect from this course?
Learning any language does not happen over night and there is generally a steep learning curve. The same is true for R. Moreover, practice makes perfect. The idea of this course is to introduce you to the basic workings of R, with a biologist's interests in mind. Specifically, we will cover some basic statics and data visualization. Some parts may feel overwhelming, but hopefully, you will see the power of R.
Course Outline
- The basics: Introducing R and RStudio
- Making your first R notebook with R markdown.
- Leaving excel behind: Manipulating data with the Tidyverse
- Data Visualization
- Basic Statistics
- Bring your own Data