1. How R Thinks
Content for Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Summary
This week we will dive into using R. We’ll get oriented to the RStudio IDE and start writing code right away. Many or perhaps all of you will have some experience with R already. Even so, things may seem confusing, and there are details that are easy to miss. The most important thing is to start doing things in R and to not get discouraged if things don’t work as expected. Remember, on the one hand computing errors (and error messages) are weird and perplexing and frustrating. But on the other hand, this is mostly because computers are fast but dumb, and can only do what they are told, not what you want. This also means that (as Julia Evans remarks somewhere) when something fails there’s always a reason, even if it’s weird or hard to track down.
Readings
- Read the syllabus, content, examples, and assignments pages for this class.
Slides
There are two batches of slides this week.
First set of slides
Second set of slides
Tip: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.