Foundational skills

This chapter is designed to give readers the skills and knowledge necessary to get started in any of the walkthrough chapters. The goal for this chapter is to provide insights into key areas of working with R, develop mental models for working with R, and ultimately begin working with R using the RStudio Integrated Development Environment (IDE) through a series of introductory applied examples. While this chapter covers introductory data manipulation in R, please note that it is not intended to be a full and complete introduction to programming with R nor to using R for data science. This chapter provides insights into key areas of working with R, develop mental models for working with R, and ultimately begin working with R using the RStudio Integrated Development Environment through a series of introductory applied examples. It covers introductory data manipulation in R, please note that it is not intended to be a full and complete introduction to programming with R nor to using R for data science. One of the first steps of every workflow should be to set up a “Project” within RStudio. A Project is the home for all of the files, images, reports, and code that are used in given project. Furthermore, even if the only person researchers ever collaborate with is a future version of themselves, using a Project for each of their analyses will mean that they can move the Project folder around on their computer, or even move it to new computer, and remain confident that the analysis will run in future.