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 datasets, working with script files, and navigating in RStudio.

4.2 Software Requirements

4.2.1 R and RStudio

Recent versions of R (version 3.2 or newer) and RStudio (version 1.0 above) are required.

You can download the latest versions from the links below:

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 Required Packages

This workshop relies on three packages: dplyr, tidyr, and readr. There are two ways to install these packages:

4.3.1 Option 1: Use `tidyverse`

You can either install these two packages individually or use tidyverse. The tidyverse package is a collection of packages used for data manipulation and visualization. In addition to dplyr, tidyr, and readr, it also includes the following:

 [1] "broom"       "cli"         "crayon"      "dplyr"       "dbplyr"     
 [6] "forcats"     "ggplot2"     "haven"       "hms"         "httr"       
[11] "jsonlite"    "lubridate"   "magrittr"    "modelr"      "purrr"      
[16] "readr"       "readxl\n(>=" "reprex"      "rlang"       "rstudioapi" 
[21] "rvest"       "stringr"     "tibble"      "tidyr"       "xml2"       
[26] "tidyverse"

You can install tidyverse using the install.packages() function:

install.packages("tidyverse")

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

packageVersion("tidyverse")

[1] '1.2.1'

To update tidyverse packages, you can use the tidyverse_update() function:

tidyverse::tidyverse_update()

4.3.2 Option 2: Install Individual Packages

If you encounter any problems installing tidyverse, then the other option is to install dplyr, tidyr, and readr individually.

install.packages("dplyr")
install.packages("tidyr")
install.packages("readr")