The Joy Of Cooking Up Code In R

The Joy Of Cooking Up Code In R (Learn R in 90 Minutes)
Led by Carl Howe, Director of Education at RStudio

Audience:

With products like the RStudio IDE, rstudio.cloud, and the tidyverse, R has become dramatically easier for ordinary people to learn, but few introductory courses employ these tools to their full advantage. This course attempts to fill that gap. In 90 minutes, we will teach attendees how they can apply R Markdown and R to everyday business problems. No prior experience with R or statistics is required.

Description:

While many data scientists eagerly use R in their day to day work, many business people don’t understand that it can be used to help them better understand data. R's command line coding and thousands of add-on packages have frequently left business users feeling like they don't have the time or the energy to learn the language, regardless of how it might benefit them.

However, new learning approaches and services make R much easier to learn today than in prior years. To prove that point, this 90-minute course will teach attendees with no prior programming experience how to:

• Load a data set into R from Google Sheets or Excel
• Perform simple analyses on that data set, and
• Publish graphical results from those analyses to a wider audience.

Students will write their code in the rstudio.cloud integrated development environment (IDE), so no software installations will be required. The class will perform its analyses using the Tidyverse, a single consistent and powerful design philosophy that the majority of R users now employ.

Requirements and Pre-work:

Before attending this class, attendees should create free accounts on rstudio.cloud. Those accounts will not be restricted to this course; attendees may continue to use those after the meetup. Students will also need a modern browser (Chrome, Edge, Safari) to access rstudio.cloud.

Attendees will find familiarity with spreadsheets to be helpful in understanding how to work with tabular data. Prior programming experience is NOT required; such experience may create incorrect expectations for some modern R practices and therefore may be distracting.