A Tutorial by Rick Wash and Matt Bietz

presented on 2007-02-12

this page contains information about a tutorial on getting started with R for doing statistics. if you're like me, you tried out R (briefly) and were immediately frustrated when you couldn't even figure out how to get your data into the software, and none of the documentation online was any help whatsoever. so, we decided to put together this tutorial to provide enough information for people who are interested in a little help with getting past the initial learning curve.

the tutorial covered topics like:

- What is R? What can and can't it do? Why would you want/not want to use it?
- Getting your data into R (read.csv, read.table)
- Getting help and finding the function you need
- Descriptive stats (mean, sd, fivenum)
- Basic testing: t.test, wilcox.test, etc.
- Anova (including within-subjects variables)
- OLS regression
- Plots (plot, boxplot, hist)
- Making plots pretty. barplots, error bars
- script management (why external text editors are your friend)
- Customization: finding and loading packages,

R can be downloaded for any operating system, from http://www.r-project.org/. The materials used in the tutorial are attached to this page.

Some Useful Web Pages

Archives for the R-SIG-Mac email list
Kickstarting R -- help getting past the steep R learning curve
R Class Notes -- more tips on getting started with R from UCLA