This course material is part of the "First Steps with R in Life Science" two-day course of SIB Training and is addressed to beginners wanting to become familiar with the R syntax, environment, and the most common commands to start using R to explore and interpret their data.
This course material provides an introduction to R and Rstudio (an integrated development environment for R) in an interactive manner. It contains example data-sets to practise data manipulation, graphical exploration and statistical hypothesis testing.
To follow this course, make sure you have R and Rstudio installed beforehand.
The course material is organized in parts corresponding to the 2 days of the course.
The slides provided contain both theory and hands-on practice session instructions.
The data used in the practicals can be found in the data course_datasets/ folder, and
solutions codes can be found in the solutions/ folder (NB: practise session 1 and 2 do not have associated code).
- Day 1 slides covers the most basic aspects
- first contact with the language and software
- most common data types in R
- reading and writing data files with R
- Day 2 - morning slides discusses visualization in R and how to create and customize simple, yet efficient, graphics from your data
- Day 2 - afternoon slides introduces how to perform statistical analysis in R (be warned: this is not a statistics course and only aims to show how the language deals with it)
In order to help you throughout the practicals, we encourage you to consult the following cheatsheetL
- keyboards cheatsheet to remember where the special characters are (
[]{}&^~\|/...) - base R cheatsheet a nice 2-pages cheatsheet with most of R basics
If you enjoyed this course or found it beneficial and want to refer to it, please cite it as :
Duchemin, W. & Burdet, F. (2025, February 5). First steps with R in Life Sciences - SIB course material. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14808144