Chapter 3 Data Analyst’s Toolbox

3.1 Install R and R Studio

R is the statistical programming language that R Studio provides and interface to. I think of R Studio as being the front-end user interface to the coding language R which works in the background. For this all to work you you need to download two things to start; R and R Studio.

  1. Install R: Go to https://cran.r-project.org/ and follow the link to the download for your operating system.
  2. Install R Studio: Go to https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/ to download R studio.

Now that you have downloaded the tools you need, lets get familiar first with R-Studio and then the R programming language.

3.1.1 Wet Your Feet

  1. R Studio Familiarization: Watch this R-Studio Tutorial for a nice introduction to the software.

  2. Start Plotting: Now that you’re familiar with the software, lets get your feet wet in R and R-Studio. I recommend you start making some plots by working through the following exercises: Section 3.1 to 3.4 in Hadley Wickham’s R for Data Science Book.

  3. Projects Workflow: Watch R-Studio tutorial: Projects and R Studio

  4. Install Hakai’s Application Programming Interface This API is installed directly in R-Studio and allows you to download data from the Hakai Database. Open up R Studio and in the console window copy and paste the following code and hit enter:

install.packages('devtools')
install.packages('tidyverse')
library('devtools')
library('tidyverse')

devtools::install_github("HakaiInstitute/hakai-api-client-r", subdir='hakaiApi')