This version of the lesson was adopted as official curriculum in July 2024. The repository has been archived. Please visit https://github.com/datacarpentry/R-ecology-lesson/ for the source repository of the official lesson.
This is an introduction to R designed for participants with no programming experience. It can be taught in 3/4 of a day (approximately 6 hours). It is a redesigned version of the original Data Carpentry lesson.
The initial effort towards this redesign was done by Michael Culshaw-Maurer in another repository in The Carpentries Incubator: https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/R-ecology-lesson (now archived). See Michael's notes while preparing the redesign in the update_plans.md file of that repository.
The lesson starts with information about the R programming language and the RStudio interface. It then moves to loading in data and exploring how to visualise it with ggplot2. The next episode takes learners through an exploration of data frames and some common data cleaning operations, before discussing vectors and factors. The final episode introduces the flow of data in R, and how to combine operations to select, filter, and mutate a data frame.
If you teach this redesigned lesson, please open an issue on this repository to share your experience.
The lesson assumes no prior knowledge of R or RStudio. Learners should have R and RStudio installed on their computers. They will also need to be able to install R packages from CRAN, create directories, and download files. See the lesson website for instructions on installing R, RStudio, and the required R packages.
Contributions to the content and development of these lesson are very welcome! If you would like to contribute, we encourage you to review our contributing guide.
If you have any questions or feedback, please open an issue, contact the maintainers, or come chat with us on the Slack Channel for this lesson. If you don't already have a Slack account with the Carpentries, you can create one.