Software for the Course
R
We'll use R, which is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display. To complete many of the assignments this semester, you'll need to become fairly proficient in R. You can download and install R on your own computer using the links below. If you don't have your own computer, you can use the software on various computers across campus.
For lots of information on R, visit the CRAN repository. On the left side of the main
CRAN page, look under "Documentation" to find links to lots of good resources for
learning R. Please let me know if you find resources that are especially helpful.
I find RStudio to be a very useful interface for using R and strongly recommend that you consider
using it for your work in the course.
- Download R (the first few links in the main frame)
- Learn about R -- lots here. Under Documentation, the six "manuals" are usually downloaded when you install R, so you can read them locally under the help menu after starting R. The FAQs contain lots of good info about R setup and operation. "Other" has links to manuals and introductions written by others. If you find any of these to be particularly good, please let me know so I can bookmark them for others.
- Visit CRAN's page that provides a variety of contributed Short Documents and Reference Cards to obtain short documents that provide you with helpful documentation many commonly used commands/functions.
- As an MSU Student, you can download the whole book or each chapter of the useful book, "A Beginner's Guide to R" by Zuur et al. for free as long as you are properly logged on to the MSU domain either on campus for from a VPN. We won't use everything in the book but it's a nice resource for lots of your work with data of various types.
- If you want to be able to produce pdf's from RMarkdown, you'll need to install LaTex.
Visit The LaTex Project page to learn more and to download the necessary software for various computer platforms
(e.g., Windows, Linux, Mac OS) under the "Get" tab.
- This class is supported by DataCamp, a helpful learning platform for learning R (as well as Python and SQL) through a
combination of short videos and hands-on exercises.
Updated: 01/26/2022