R4All: An introduction to the basics of R

Prof. Dr. Owen Petchey (University of Zurich) & Martina Jelic (www.r4all.org)

Novice R users with a life and environmental science background.

• CHF 600.- for members of UZH/ETH and associated institutes
• CHF 800.- for alumni of UZH/ETH, members of other universities, the public sector and non-profit organizations
• CHF 1200.- for companies

Persons without current employment can register for the UZH/ETH fee upon request.

This course gives an easy and comfortable boost up what is often thought to be a steep initial learning curve. R4All has been providing this course to researchers across the globe for over ten years, giving the time and experience to design and finesse the course structure and content. We use and teach a modern approach to working in R, which focuses on simple, intuitive, and coherent tools (centred on the “tidyverse”).
Topics include:
    • Getting acquainted with R and RStudio.
    • Your first script.
    • Getting help.
    • Add-on packages.
    • Preparing data for R (introducing tidy data concept).
    • Getting data into R.
    • Basic and intermediate data cleaning (lubridate, tidyr)
    • Basic and intermediate data manipulating, with dplyr.
    • Basic and intermediate data visualization, with ggplot2.
    • Putting this together to solve a problem.
    • Report creation with Knitr.
The course particularly addresses participants from life sciences (e.g., medicine, biology) or other fields with little prior experience in statistical analyses. Basic knowledge of statistics (e.g. linear regression) will be reviewed during the course. Furthermore, the course requires no previous experience with R.

For all Zurich R Courses participants should bring their own laptops to the course. Internet access will be provided, to allow installation of any required software and packages.