In this book we will learn the basics of R, one of the best software for visualization and statistical analysis of data. We will start from scratch by understanding the fundamental aspects of R and the concepts behind each programming language that will allow you to later deepen and develop your skills in this beautiful world.
The book is available at https://psicostat.github.io/Introduction2R/.
All materials are in Italian.
The book is divided into four main sections:
- Get started. Once R and RStudio are installed, we will familiarize with the work environment introducing some general aspects and main functions. We will also describe some good rules for starting a workinng session in R.
- Data structure. We will learn the main objects used in R. Variables, vectors, matrices, data frames, and lists will no longer have secrets and we will understand how to manipulate and use them according to the various needs.
- Algorithms. Don't panic. You may have often heard of this as something very complicated, but in reality, algorithms are just a series of instructions that the computer follows when it has to perform a certain task. In this section we will see the main R commands used to define algorithms. This is the advantage of knowing a programming language, it allows us to create new programs that the computer will execute for us.
- Case study. We will perform a step-by-step analysis that will allow us to learn how to import data, encode variables, prepare the data for analysis, conduct descriptive analyses and create graphs.
At the end of this book you will probably not be hired by Google, but we hope at least that R does not scare you so much anymore and that maybe someone is interested in learning more about this fantastic world made of lines of code.
This book was produced by Claudio Zandonella Callegher and Filippo Gambarota members of Psicostat, an interdisciplinary research group interested in Psychology and Statistics, our goal is to promote the connection between the two fields! If you want to know more about our activities visit our website https://psicostat.dpss.psy.unipd.it/ or add yourself to our mailing list https://lists.dpss.psy.unipd.it/postorius/lists.
Surely there are many typos to fix and new arguments to include. Anyone is welcome to contribute to this book. For small typos just send a pull request with all the corrections. To propose new chapters or paragraph, istead, open an issue to discuss and plan them.
The template of this book is based on Rstudio Bookdown-demo released under CC0-1.0 license and rstudio4edu-book released under CC BY license. Note that the illustrations used belong to rstudio4edu-book and are under CC BY-NC licensed.
This book is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-SA). The illustrations used belong to rstudio4edu-book and are licensed under CC BY-NC.
