Presenting Materials for Intermediate UseRs

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We’ve been teaching R workshops for over a year now at the University of Melbourne, and one thing we’ve noticed is the disparity in skill level among workshop attendees. Researchers generally fall into one of two catergories:

1. Absolute novices: those who have heard of R, but have never touched a programming language before.

2. Regular users: those who are using R in their research, possibly on a regular basis. They can modify scripts, and have a general understanding of the language basics, but want to extend their knowledge.

Those who fall into the first category fit the Software Carpentry attendee archetype. The novice materials work well for them. The latter group typically find the novice materials too basic, and end up quickly bored and tune out. However, like the absolute novice they have never encountered programming concepts, and have never written their own function, nor understand for loops.

Early last year we recieved a request to run a workshop for a group of quantitative ecologists at the University of Melbourne. The organiser, Saras Windecker had attended a novice workshop previously, found the material too basic, but had appreciated the best practices and programming concepts. Together we sat down, and came up with a rough outline for some of the extension material she thought her group would find useful, and taught a two day workshop themed “effectively working with data”. A write up of the workshop can be found here

Since then, we’ve typed up our notes from the workshop into the Software Carpentry lesson format, and can now present you with intermediate materials for regular useRs

Just like the novice materials, the lesson spends a lot of time covering the staple programming concepts taught by Software Carpentry:

• functions
• control flow
• looping
• code organisation
• best practices

At a faster pace, we also expose attendees to more advanced concepts and R specific material that gets missed out in novice lessons:

• The apply family of functions.
• Effective data manipulation using data.table and reshape2.
• How to solve “split-apply-combine” problems with data.table and plyr.
• Solving embarrassingly parallel problems with parallel foreach loops.
• Reproducible documents with R markdown.

We hope that the community finds these materials useful and look forward to hearing about intermediate and advanced R workshops in the future!