Welcome!

Welcome to the Writing Better R Code workshop! The course website can be found at nrennie.rbind.io/training-better-r-code, where you will also find a copy of the slides.

Contents

It can feel like a big jump to go from learning R in a taught module, to using R for research projects in the real world. You might be starting to write scripts that are becoming endlessly long, you might have lots of different R scripts, or you might be struggling to understand the code you wrote six months ago. When you ask for feedback from colleagues or supervisors, you might end up with scripts called code_final.R and then code_final_v2.R. If any of this sounds familiar, then this course is for you. In this workshop, you’ll learn tips and tricks to write better R code that is easier to read, manage, and share with others. In this workshop, we’ll cover:

  • R projects
  • Linting and styling code
  • Organising R scripts
  • Dealing with code that depends on other things

Prerequisites

Please bring a laptop (and charger). The workshop assumes you have a (reasonably recent version of) R and RStudio installed on your laptop.

Ideally, you will have registered for a GitHub account at https://github.com/ before you attend the session. There’s some advice on choosing a username here: https://happygitwithr.com/github-acct#username-advice. If you do not already have Git installed on your laptop, please install it before the session. See https://happygitwithr.com/install-git#install-git for instructions (or use AppsAnywhere).

R packages

There’s no need to install these before the session, but we’ll be using the following R packages:

  • readr
  • dplyr
  • forcats
  • forestmodel
  • ggcorrplot
  • ggplot2
  • gt
  • gtsummary
  • lintr
  • styler
  • reprex
pkgs <- c(
  "readr", "dplyr", "forcats", "forestmodel",
  "ggcorrplot", "ggplot2", "gt", "gtsummary", "lintr", "styler",
  "reprex"
)
install.packages(pkgs)
Collaborating on code with Git and GitHub for R users

The workshop materials for the session on collaborating on code with Git and GitHub for R users can be found at nrennie.rbind.io/training-git-r.

Further training

View other available training courses and workshops at nrennie.rbind.io/projects/training-workshops.