This course is an introduction to programming in R for people with little or no previous programming experience. Built around the common scientific task of data analysis, it will teach you the basic concepts and tools in R and how to manage your data. R is a powerful language for statistical computing and graphics, widely used in data mining, bioinformatics, and many other fields.
Difficulty rating: ★★☆☆ Beginner
Who is it for?
Both research staff and research students
Summary of the topics covered
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- Install R and RStudio on your own machine
- Launch RStudio and navigate the interface
- Understand how R works with variables, vectors, data frames, and common data types
- Read datasets (CSV) into R and inspect their structure
- Explore, clean, and prepare data using the dplyr package
- Reshape and tidy data using the tidyr package
- Create a range of plots with the ggplot2 package
- Write, save, and re-run R scripts for reproducible analysis
- (Optional) Use R Markdown to combine text and code into reproducible reports
Prerequisites
Learners need to understand the concepts of files and directories (including the working directory).
Duration
6 hours (over 2 half days)
Next course
22nd October 2025. Book here.
Can't attend?
We don’t have online materials for this session, but the course will run again — so you’ll be very welcome to join next time.
User Group
There is an R user group with links to resources and contacts.
Help with R
If you need help with using R, you can contact our Research Software Group for advice. You can also raise a ServiceDesk ticket with us, or attend one of our drop-in sessions.