4 Getting Started

4.1 Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of working with datasets in R is essential. This course assumes that you’re comfortable with reading and manipulating datasets, working with script files, and navigating in RStudio. Experience with plotting functions in R is helpful but not required.

4.2 Software Requirements

4.2.1 R and RStudio

Recent versions of R (version 3.2 or newer) and RStudio (version 0.99 or above) are required.

You can download the latest versions from the links below:

• Download R
• Download RStudio

You can find out the version of R installed by typing version at the console:

version

##                _                           
## platform       x86_64-pc-linux-gnu         
## arch           x86_64                      
## os             linux-gnu                   
## system         x86_64, linux-gnu           
## status                                     
## major          3                           
## minor          4.2                         
## year           2017                        
## month          01                          
## day            27                          
## svn rev        73369                       
## language       R                           
## version.string R version 3.4.2 (2017-01-27)
## nickname       Short Summer

4.3 Installing ggplot2

If you don’t have ggplot2 installed, you can install it using the install.packages() function:

install.packages("ggplot2")

You can find out the version of ggplot installed using the packageVersion() function:

packageVersion("ggplot2")

## [1] '2.2.1'

4.4 Installing ggplot2 Extentions

We need the following ggplot extensions for this tutorial:

install.packages("scales")
install.packages("ggrepel")
install.packages("ggthemes")