DSI Workshop: Beyond Basics in R

Links to Workshop Recordings and Resources

• Slides and code
• Recording part 1
• Recording part 2
• Recording part 3

Information

• Dates: September 10, 12, & 14 12:30-3:30pm
• Instructor: Duncan Temple Lang
• Location: Data Science Initiative classroom, Shields 360
• Cost: Free to UC Davis students, postdocs, faculty and staff. DSI Affiliates have priority registration.

Description

So you’ve learned how to use R, or maybe you’ve already been using it, but now what? The goals of this workshop are to improve your proficiency and confidence in using “best practices” for leveraging R and writing good code. This workshop focuses on why and how we do things in R, and not about learning specific function names.

Topics covered will include:

• How to reason about R code and R’s computational model.
• Writing R functions for flexibility and reusability.
• Debugging.
• Making code efficient, and different approaches to problems.
• Creating R packages.
• Object oriented programming basics.
• And any other R-related questions.

Prerequisites

This workshop goes beyond “getting started,” but the material will be accessible to people who are just at that stage and beyond. Participants are expected to have basic familiarity with R and be able to write a simple function.

Workshop format

The workshop will be a mix of presentation and hands on problem solving/working on code. You’ll get practice and background to write better code.

Got Code?

If you have code you want to make better (more efficient/simpler/faster), please contact datascience@ucdavis.edu ASAP and we can consider using it as a case study.