Rstudio is an open source software package used for statistical analysis. It seems to fit between Excel/Google Sheets on the lower end of analysis tools and MatLab on the higher end of analysis tools. There is a free version, which makes it very popular in science labs around the world where funding is not sufficient enough to afford MatLab for everyone. Apparently RStudio is also used by employees at some of the worlds biggest companies for data analysis too. There is also a paid version of RStudio. Have no clue how it might compare to MatLab.

As I understand it, Rstudio is the follow up (or overlay) to R. The scripting language used in Rstudio is refereed to as R. It looks like a cross between Javascript and basic. It takes more from javascript for sure. Identical in some areas. Under the hood, it's Javascript. You can check that by entering a built in function name in the console without the () and it will return the code for the function instead of firing the function.

You must have R on your computer to run RStudio. We found this out by loading Rstudio first and trying to run. It said we were missing R.

This website details the short path I took to learning Rstudio. The ultimate goal was to graph data, but as you will see, we didn't necessarily go after that goal head on. Actually, we did, but when we got stuck on step 2, we backtracked and started building this site for our own reference.

We made sure to familiarize ourselves with the software (RStudio) and the underlying programming language (R) in a broader way first.

Hopefully this will short cut your learning curve to RStudio and R programming, and give you an example of how you might want to approach any new software environment. With this, you can do in an hour or a few what took us longer, with an e-z reference to refer back to that we didn't have when we started this.

Session 1

Step 1 - Download and Install R from www.r- project.org

1) To download R, go to www.r-project.org.

2) Pick any of the servers to download from

3) Select OS

4) Select "install R for the first time"

Step 2 - Download and Install Rstudio and watch out for evil google advertising in play...

This was confusing... we googled rstudio and got this..

When we hovered over the Download Rstudio "link" the mouse did not turn to a little hand as it should. We clicked and got redirected here...

Google has changed up their ad service recently ( in the early September 2019 time frame). It's gotten quite evil. Search results will appear, and a half second later they will all be shifted down for paid results coming in higher, the ad markings have gotten more subtle, and the bounce that happens on the insert is cognitively disturbing such that the conscious mind briefly checks out as the ads are served. That's not the worst of it. In this case, when the user hovers over the download link, the mouse doesn't turn to a little hand like it should. The arrow stays. If you click (with the arrow showing instead of the hand), a new tab opens and you are redirected via bing to this other website that is promoting Nvidia Data Science Workstations. I like google, but some wonky ppl seem to be getting control of their ad service? Just go back to your search results page, try hovering over Download RStudio again, and you should see the little hand come up and then click it...

I have a video of the behavior if anyone would like it....

Step 3 -Open RStudio

In my case, I added a desktop shortcut. Click on it and the program opens.

If you are familiar with Google Script console as it works with Google sheets, there are a lot of crossovers from a functional interactive perspective, although it may not look anything like it.

Learning one of these would be a good way to learn the other and visa versa. Learning both at the same time might help new folks see universal programming concepts as rolled out by two very different programming groups.

The User Interface - read from 1) Upper Left to 2) Lower Left to 3) Lower Right to 4) Upper Right

1) Upper Left Frame - Script files. A script can be written in this window outside of a function. The script can be 'run', with the play button (not shown below as the current file in that window is just an introductory text file with no discernible script, so they hide those buttons). Note, to run a script outside of a function, you need to "highlight it" before firing it. Not intuitive. We'll detail below. Scripts can also be wrapped in functions as is the case with all modern programming languages, but before those can be called, the script has to be submitted to memory first, which also is not overly intuitive. This is not a file save, it's something different, that does in fact do a file save too. All this will be detailed below, just giving you a primer now.

4) The Upper Right Frame - The "Environment Tab" has a mix of functions. First, as you start programming you will start to see the Global Variables documented there as you create them. This will make more sense when you start working with it and start getting a better understanding of the difference between Global scope variables and more limited scope variables such as those defined within a function. There is also a button to "Import Data". We started off there by importing date from Excel and then pushing it to the window to the left. That was a very bad place to start as we had no clue how to do anything with that data once it was loaded, so we back tracked to what we are sharing now. The "History Tab" offers a view of the execution history for the session. The "Connections Tab" presumably allows you to create and/or monitor live data connections to other data sources like databases and/or spreadsheets maybe. This is the alternative to loading in static data, if that's what this is.

2) Bottom Left Frame - This has three tabs by default. The "console tab" is where you " interact" with the software environment. When you do something, it tells you what it is doing and it speaks back to you via this console. You can also ask it to do things from this console. In that sense it's like asking a PC to do something from a DOS prompt or command line prompt. The "terminal tab" is in fact a DOS prompt on the PC version. Not sure what might be there on a MAC version or other. I don't know what the "jobs tab" is yet.

3) Bottom Right Frame -- The bottom right frame has a lot of tabs in it. The "Files Tab" is a computer directory but doesn't look very organized on a PC. Will likely stick with the File menu at top to open files. The "Plots tab" is where the graphs output to if you are plotting. The "Packages Tab" allows you to see all the code libraries available and or installed. The term User Library in there seems very confusing to me, as does the term Packages. Ignore their terminology for now. Just think of these as bundles of routines that can be made available to you if desired (I think that's what this is, anyway). The "Help Tab" leads to html files that were installed on your machine. That is just a mini browser built into that tab. It's frustrating you can not right click and open up those files into a larger browser window. On my machine it says 127.0.0.1 not accessible when I try. Maybe if I change my IIS security settings I could get that to work. Not sure what the "Viewer Tab" is at this time.

Step 4 - Learn how to interact with RStudio via an example provided by someone else..

We tried to import data and do something with it right away without knowing what or how the software did what it does. We got data from a spreadsheet in, but from there, we were pretty clueless. That didn't go well.

We took a step back, went to youtube, and searched for a basic video that seemed like it was kind of related to what we were interested and started there.

We viewed a few briefly before finding this one. As always, it can be brutal getting past music and off target videos to find a good one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMNLB7QXXXM

The beginning of this was a little confusing as he seems to start in the middle of some ideas. When he gets to 0:50 seconds he starts covering some code. I'm not sure a newbie could follow the details, but anyone with prior coding background could have used this video to make big progress understanding syntax and one aspect of software functionality. We can use this example as an exceptional way to become familiar with RStudio syntax, with a little work as we'll show below.

As you will see below, I will cross over his code to what I'd have written if this was my code. A copy of my version of his code is at the bottom of this page, so no need to take notes or make notes on my crossover comments. Just read this, try to follow along wihtout thinking too hard and without getting ahead of the lesson, and remember, you can come back to this point and reread it later. Just try to flow with this from the here to the bottom of the page and see how easy it can be to learn to code with a little help.

x <- c(1:3) -- > This is confusing as crap. First, rstudio allows <- to stand in for =. How about we just use =. Second, the format for setting an "array" in Rstudio is actuall c( ) . (as compared to using [ ] in javascript) Third, Rstudio allows short hand for data entry in an array. x = c(1:3) = c(1, 2, 3) is what we will use to learn with. It's the same as what he wrote.

y <-x --> He's just setting y = x. But this is now confusing too as he's using x and y as if they are single value. Let's rename those. Using something lie 'arr' as the start of all variable names that are arrays will dramatically clarify your programming work as you star scaling up into much larger projects.

arrXValues = c(1, 2, 3)

arrYValues = arrXValues

And in fact, what we are talking about is data points with coordinates (1,1) , (2,2) and (3,3), and these would create a 45 degree line going up .

Now we are on line 5. What the heck is "par"?!

Turns out, "par" is a reserved word that allows you to set "parameters" for the graph.

pch allow you to select values that coorelate to different shapes for your data points. 19 is a round cirlce. 11 was a box
col allows you to set the color for the graph

In this case, to keep the code lines short, he set more pars on line 7. That mfrow clause could have been added after col="red" in line 5 by adding an additional comma.

mfrow is where the number of rows and columns is set for the graphs taht are goign to be outputted (he will be outputting 8 graphs,, and c(2,4) simply denotes 2 rows, 4 columns. This will make sense shortly.

Now we are on line 9. ops. What the heck are 'ops' and is it a reserved word?!

No, ops is not a reserved word. These variables in this array actually specify the line style in a graph to be outputted.

we'll rename "ops" to "arrLineTypes" to help us out cognitively..

p = point only
l = line without points
o= line with points (continuous line)
b= line with points (breaks around points)
c= line without points and breaks around point locations
s= step line, rise at beginning
S= step line, rise at end
h= bar style graph with lines only

Now were on line 11. A for - in loop.

For-in and For-each loops, often just referred to as "for loops" are the most common programming loops in all modern programming languages.

Each programming platform has slightly different syntax and this one is actually one of the more confusing ones, but it'll work fine. In general, with a programming loop, you are going to loop through a set of code multiple times, changing some variables each time to achieve a collection of similar but different outputs.

When a shirt is screen printed, they put the screen on for red first, put red dye on the screen, and then push back and forth. The pushing back and forth is the looped routine and the screen for red and red dye are what changes with the next loop.

Line 11 still...

for( i in 1:length(ops) ) should be thought of as "go through this loop for each "item" in the the ops array, starting with 1 and going to the last item in the array.

The syntax here is really quite dreadful. Looking at syntax of Javascript you can see an alternate syntax in another platform that is a little softer on the mind.

for (i = 0; i < ops.length; i++)
NOTE: Javascript uses a 0 based array system. RStudio uses a 1 based array system. Ironically, both a zero and one based array system used a 1 based system for counting the number of items in the array, often referred to as "length". (if you need help with this, look it up)

Line 11 still...

Basically, this loop is going to loop through the ops array (lineType array) and it is going to create a thumbnail size graph with the same x,y data for each of the 8 line types defined in the ops array.

heading IS NOT a reserved word. That is a variable he made up. paste("type=",ops[i]) is in fact a command to concatenate the text "type=" with the line type code in "ops". So in the first loop, this string variable gets set to "type=p" I would have used a generic string name variable instead of 'heading' so as to imply my own variable. str1 = paste("type=", arrLineTypes[i])

plot IS a reserved word. This is the call to create the x and y axis, add a line if desired, and add the title to the graph referred to as "main". He is in fact using the data values themselves to define the start and end of the axes, which is a little confusing until you realize that is what he is doing...

Line 13 detail...

This might make more sense with our variables... plot(arrXValues, arrYValues, type="n", main=str1)

== Letter "n" explained ==

It seems in this plot command, which only really defines the x axis, y axis and graph title, you could in fact specify a line type. The letter "n" is an alternative option to the other letters in the ops() array (arrLineType). My guess is that this allows for a default line type if none is specified when the lines are created in the next step.

One thing this shows, is that you can in fact create the axes of a graph with a title and no line. So for that, it's good education.

Line 15 detail...

lines(x, y, type=ops[i] >> This is the command to create the line itself and it allows you to specify the line type. We might write it as lines(xAxisValue, yAxisValues, type=lineTypes[i]

Line 16, when it gets to that bottom }, because that denotes the end of the loop it goes back to line 12 where the loop began with { and runs again, only this time is uses position 2 in the array. And it does this 8 times.

To Run this script you will click on the Run button... BUT BUT BUT... you must highlight the text first?! So not intuitive this was... I had to watch the video a few times to realize that was part of the game.

1) Use your mouse and highlight the text.

2) Click run with text you want to run highlighted..

And Whala!!

Congrats! You've just completed Session 1 of a programming lesson and didn't even know it! Learning programming can be relatively pain free. Unfortunately many good with tech who are teaching it right now just don't quite realize how to separate all the ideas quite well enough for the experienced professionals who are content experts and not so familiar with programming yet.

This education continues with Session 2 if you'd like! We are actually going to slow down, and take some steps back now to become more familiar with some things, now that we can see how powerful this can be...

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