Fundamentals of R for Biologists Ebook

This free ebook was designed to teach the absolute fundamentals of the R programming language specifically for those in or looking to enter the biological sciences. It makes no assumptions of coding ability and uses examples based on real, biological datasets.

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Topics include:

What is R and Rstudio?

Basics of R

Manipulating objects and logic

Introduction to Tidyverse

Cleaning data and creating pipelines

if-else, for-loops, and custom functions

Visualizing data with ggplot2

Section 0 – Introduction to R and Rstudio is meant for those who may have never written a single line of
code, are incredibly lost anytime they read documentation for R, or may have never even heard of R and
Rstudio before.
Section 1 – Basics of R introduces objects, the loading/saving data, and the basics of visualizing your data.
Section 2 – Manipulating Objects and Logic largely covers subsetting and logic including how to combine different
datasets using the rbind(), cbind() and merge() functions.
Section 3 – Introduction to Tidyverse introduces the tidyverse package, pipes, and a variety of tidyverse functions such as select(), relocate(), filter(), mutate(), summarize(), and group_by() functions to name a few.
Section 4 – Cleaning Data and Creating Pipelines is specifically aimed at cleaning datasets. Here we introduce
best practices for data cleaning and a variety of methods to fix problematic data.
Section 5 – Logic, Custom Functions, and apply() teaches students how to fork their code with
if-else statements, run functions over entire data sets use for-loops, and how to create their
own custom functions.
Section 6 – Plotting with ggplot2 covers how to visualize data with the ggplot2 package including a how to map variables to aesthetics, faceting our data, and how to customize every element of a ggplot!