Intermediate R: Thinking in R (2-Part Series)

Description: This 2-part workshop series (January 17 and January 19, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM) aims to help learners who are already familiar with R take a look under-the-hood at how the language works. This will make you a more confident and productive R programmer by making it easier for you to reason about code as you write and run it. You'll also learn how to debug code if it doesn’t do what you want.

This series is NOT an introduction to R. The target audience is motivated intermediate to advanced learners from all domains at UC Davis who want to hone their R skills. Please make sure you meet the prerequisites before registering.               

Learning Objectives

After completing this workshop series, learners should be able to:

• Explain how R resolves variables
• Explain how function calls work
• Explain how R searches for packages
• Explain and use the S3 class system
• Interpret and catch warnings and errors
• Plan an approach for debugging code
• Identify where to go to learn more.          

Prerequisites: These workshops are not an introduction to R. Participants are expected to have prior experience using R, be comfortable with basic R syntax, and to have it pre-installed and running on their laptops. This series is appropriate for motivated intermediate to advanced users who want a better understanding of base R.  

Software: Latest version of the R programming language.             

Instructor: Nick Ulle

Instructor Bio: Nick Ulle is a statistician and computer scientist. Prior to DataLab he was a visiting assistant professor of Statistics at UC Berkeley, where he designed and taught courses in data science. During his PhD in Statistics at UC Davis, he developed source code analysis techniques for the R programming language. His research interests include statistical computing, programming languages, data visualization, and pedagogy.