An intro to R
by Karthik Ram. Average Reading Time: less than a minute.
A few weeks back I gave a talk at the local Berkeley R meetup group. The idea was to help people not make the same mistakes I made when I first started out learning R. It was the first time I made an entire presentation with Deck.js and I generated the syntax highlighted R code using knitr. Check it out.
An intro to R http://t.co/Jjq0WcPq
An intro to R http://t.co/Jjq0WcPq
Inundata – An intro to R http://t.co/lf3eXIGd
Very useful introductory slides.
On the slide 24 there is a small typo:
x|y
a|2
should be:
x|y
a|3
I’m curious about one of your slides – you said don’t set the working directory in the console, instead always set it in a script. This is contrary to Hadley Wickham’s advice http://stat405.had.co.nz/lectures/05-shortcuts.pdf
He says never set your wd in a script.
Do you mind sharing your reasoning behind setting the wd in a script?
Thanks!
Hadley’s approach is also the one I would recommend now (he did comment on this slide too). Setting one’s working directory from the console is a better practice.
However, I targeted this presentation at academics who typically do not pay close attention best practices when it comes to programming. A common behavior I’ve seen is where all R scripts sit in one single folder, rather than being saved in the same folder as the corresponding project. In such cases, when executing R scripts, explicitly setting the working directory at the top ensures that results and figures don’t get written all over the hard drive (or wherever the most recent working diretory was set).