Please read through the course introduction before you start with the first chapter.
The purpose of this course is to teach you basic R programming skills in a well structured way and a reasonable amount of time. No prior knowledge regarding R or other programming languages are required before starting with the Self-Study R Course (SSRC).
This course is not about teaching you statistics. Hence, results (e.g. of a regression model) or plots are not interpreted in the sample solutions. Obviously, understanding the methods you are applying with R and the interpretation of the respective results should be a crucial part of any data analysis project you are doing. However, to keep this course focused and concise, we decided to ignore statistics and inference aspects to a large extent.
We assume participants to know some very basic statistics concepts. Which statistics concepts we consider to be very basic is described in the section below. In the chapters where some more advanced statistics methods are applied, we provide links to YouTube videos that explain the respective concepts in an intuitive way.
We assume participants to know the statistics concepts that are presented in the list below.
If you do not know a concept, just click on it. You will then be redirected to a YouTube video that explains the concept in an intuitive way.
After successfully completing this course, you should be able to
Although the SSRC covers a lot of important and relevant aspects, it still scratches at the surface of the R universe. If you work with real world data or if you have to apply more complex statistical methods, you will have to extent your R skill set beyond what is covered in the SSRC. This course is supposed to lay the foundation for solving such problems in R, though. Because of that, the overarching learning objective of this course is that you learn how to learn stuff in R by yourself. This is why the content and teaching parts of the SSRC are collected from diverse, free and immediately available web sources and not customized videos produced by ourselves.
The SSRC consists of eight chapters that are building up on each other. Each chapter has its own tab on this website. The eight chapters are:
All chapters (except chapter 8) are structured in the same way. At the core of each chapter is an exercise sheet you are supposed to solve throughout the chapter. An instructions document that is provided in the sub-tab “Instructions” guides you through the process of completing the respective exercise sheet. The instructions document tells you step by step what you have to do to solve the exercise sheet. Usually you will be asked to e.g. watch a YouTube video that teaches you the R skills that are needed to solve the subsequent task(s) of the exercise sheet. In a next step, you will then be asked to solve exactly those tasks.
To make the process of solving the exercise sheets more convenient, we also provide an R-script template for each exercise sheet.
There is also a sample solution for each of the exercise sheets and the case study. However, we recommend that you really try hard to solve the exercise sheets on your own before you check out the sample solution.
If you have problems with working with the SSRC, please check out the FAQs. If the FAQs cannot help you, you can also contact us via e-mail (to php@sg.tum.de, subject: SSRC).
The time you will need for a particular chapter and the whole SSRC depends on your programming experience, accuracy, pragmatism etc. This means that it is impossible to make a general statement regarding time requirements. However, to facilitate better planning for you, we at least provide a rough time estimate for each of the chapters below. If you need more time for one or the other chapter, you should not feel bad about it, though.
Rough Time Estimates:
Chapter 1: 2-3h
Chapter 2: 3-4h
Chapter 3: 3-4h
Chapter 4: 3-4h
Chapter 5: 2-3h
Chapter 6: 3-4h
Chapter 7: 2-3h
Chapter 8: 6-8h
In total the course will require a time effort of about 30 hours.
When you invest your time to do the chapters is completely up to you. You can do the whole course in just one week, do one chapter per week, etc. However, since the chapters are building up on each other, you should not let to much time pass between doing the different chapters.
The R community is very active and helpful. There are YouTube videos, blog posts, forum discussions (e.g. Stackoverflow) on almost everything.
Furthermore, many ebooks on learning and using R are free and available online: https://bookdown.org/
If you want to do something in R but you do not now how to do it…
As soon as you start working with R, you will also start getting error messages from R. Do not worry about that, this is absolutely normal. Even the most experienced R users regularly make this experience. The important thing is that you know how to deal with these error messages once they occur. Below you find a list of things that you could do when you get an error message:
In 99.9 % of the cases this will do the job.
If you cannot find a solution in a reasonable amount of time, you should start looking for a workaround (e.g. a different R package).
[Do not worry if you do not yet understand all of the bullet points above. After doing the first two chapters of the SSRC, this should all make sense to you.]