During the course we will be using both R and RStudio. To get your computer ready for this course please follow the instructions under Core Software and Get the Data headings.
Install R. You’ll need R version 4.2.1 or higher. Download and install R for Windows, Mac (download the latest R-4.x.x.pkg file for your appropriate version of Mac OS) or linux (choose your flavour of linux).
Install RStudio. Download and install the free RStudio Desktop version.
You will need to download and install R and RStudio separately. R is the underlying statistical computing environment. RStudio is a graphical integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R a little easier. You need to install R before you install RStudio.
See the following video for step by step instructions to installing R and RStudio.
And see this video for a short introduction to using RStudio.
Click the Data link on the navbar at the top of the course website and follow one of the two options described. You can either download all the data needed by downloading this zip file or by downloading individual data sets as needed at the Data page. If you download the zip file you will need to use your favourite software to uncompress this file (although most operating systems now have at least one built-in (un)compression tool).
Installing R markdown is not required for this course. However, for those of you who are interested in using R markdown to create reproducible reports (or websites like this one!) follow these instructions to install R markdown on your computer. We also have a separate tutorial on using R markdown which goes into way more detail.
For those of you interested in using version control to keep track of your projects please see our Introduction to Git and GitHub tutorial for information on how to install and configure Git and GitHub on your computer. Note, this is not required to complete this course.