Introduction to programming in R

Dries Debeer, Benjamin Becker

Advanced R users from all professional groups. (For introductory R courses please revisit the course list.)

• CHF 600.- for members of UZH/ETH and associated institutes
• CHF 800.- for alumni of UZH/ETH, members of other universities, the public sector and non-profit organizations
• CHF 1200.-for companies

In various scientific fields R has become as a popular tool for data processing, analysis and visualization. Yet in addition to a software package for statistical and data analysis, R is also a fully functioning programming language. Moreover, one of the main design principles of R is to "turn ideas into software, quickly and faithfully" (John Chambers). However, many R users have limited programming background and may not be aware of the full potential of R.

This course introduces R as a programming language. The basic building stones of the language will be explained using examples and exercises. The aim is to provide R users the experience and the tools to automate R-tasks that have to be done repeatedly, by writing efficient code and helpful functions. After the course, participants should be able to read, understand, and adapt code from others, as well as write their own functions, and use the complex tool R more efficiently.

After setting up an RStudio environment that supports writing efficient and elegant R-code, the following topics are covered during the course:

- Basic elements and data types of the programming language R

- Flow and conditional programming

- Loops and iteration

- Writing functions

- Good programming practices

- Programming tools in R: run time analysis, debugging, exception handling