Chapter 1 Course Logistics and Expectations

1.1 Course Description

In this course, you will learn the fundamentals of R, a statistical programming language, and use it to wrangle data for analysis and visualization. The programming skills you will learn are transferable to learn more about R independently and other high-level languages such as Python. At the end of the class, you will be reproducing analysis from a scientific publication!

1.2 Learning Objectives

After taking this course, you will be able to:

  • Analyze Tidy datasets in the R programming language via data wrangling, summary statistics, and visualization.
  • Describe how the R programming environment interpret complex expressions made out of functions, operations, and data structures, in a step-by-step way.
  • Apply problem solving strategies to debug broken code.

1.3 Course Website

All course information will be available here:

https://hutchdatascience.org/Intro_to_R

All of our R computation will be done in the Posit.cloud workspace. Please register for an account at https://posit.cloud, and a classroom invitation will be sent.

1.4 DaSL Courses are a Psychologically Safe Space

We want everyone to feel ok with asking questions. That’s why we adhere to the Participation Guidelines for each course.

Be respectful of each other and how we learn differently. It is never ok to disparage people for their questions.

1.5 Clinical Network Issues

We know that learners on the Clinical network are having issues accessing material, including websites. We are working to figure out good workarounds for it.

If you are connected via VPN, we recommend that you disconnect it while working.

1.6 Words of Encouragement

This was adopted from Andrew Heiss. Thanks!

I promise you can succeed in this class.

Learning R can be difficult at first—it’s like learning a new language, just like Spanish, French, or Chinese. Hadley Wickham—the chief data scientist at RStudio and the author of some amazing R packages you’ll be using like ggplot2—made this wise observation:

It’s easy when you start out programming to get really frustrated and think, “Oh it’s me, I’m really stupid,” or, “I’m not made out to program.” But, that is absolutely not the case. Everyone gets frustrated. I still get frustrated occasionally when writing R code. It’s just a natural part of programming. So, it happens to everyone and gets less and less over time. Don’t blame yourself. Just take a break, do something fun, and then come back and try again later.

Even experienced programmers find themselves bashing their heads against seemingly intractable errors. If you’re finding yourself taking way too long hitting your head against a wall and not understanding, take a break, talk to classmates, e-mail me, etc.

1.7 Patient / Clinical Data is a No on Posit Cloud

The Posit Cloud workspace is for your learning. Please do not put any patient or clinical information on there.

1.8 Offerings

This course is taught on a regular basis at Fred Hutch Cancer Center through the Data Science Lab. Announcements of course offering can be found here. If you wish to follow the course content asynchronously, you may access the course content on this website and exercises and solutions on Posit Cloud. The Posit Cloud compute space can be copied to your own workspace for personal use, and you can get started via this introduction. Or, you can access the exercises and solutions on GitHub.

All illustrations CC-BY.
All other materials CC-BY unless noted otherwise.