Introduction to Programming in R (20 hours)

This is an introductory course in R. R has become a common language for programming in the fields of data analysis and statistics. The fact that it is a free and open source, with a rich collection of useful libraries has made R an attractive language to larn; The course is more about how to use R and write your programs to do various data science tasks. The students will learn how to store, retrieve and update data in R. They will also learn how to write efficient vectorised code in R.

It will be useful for the following types of students:

--those who use data analysis tools but want to learn R to be able to create their functions.

--those who want to learn a new programming language and have decided on R because of its usage in data science.

Prerequisites: This is a first level course in R. Some prior knowledge of programming will be useful.

What do the students need to bring to class?

Pen, paper and maybe a laptop.

Syllabus

I. Introduction

--R UI, RStudio, Functions, Arguments, Scripts

II. R Objects

--Vectors

--Attributes

--Matrices

--Arrays

--Classes

--Factors

--Lists

--Frames

III. Operations

--Selection

--Modification

--Logical subsetting

IV. Complexity

--Loops 

--Efficiency Issues, Loops versus vectorised code