About this package
r4ds.tutorials provides tutorials for R for Data Science (2e) by Hadley Wickham, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Garrett Grolemund. These tutorials assume that you have some experience working with the tools provided by the tutorial.helpers package. As long as you have completed the “Getting Started” tutorial from that package, you should be fine.
The main audience for these tutorials is instructors teaching introductory data science and their students. Instructors want students to, for example, read Chapter 8 of R for Data Science (2e) (or something similar), typing in the code at the R Console along the way. Sadly, students almost never do that. Indeed, many (most?) of them won’t even read the assigned chapter.
The promise we make to instructors is that, if they assign our tutorial for Chapter 8, then students will type in at least 90% of the code examples from the chapter, and then run the code to see what happens. We also pull out some of the most important prose from the chapter and do everything we can to cajole/trick students into reading it. These two essays provide background information about our approach.
Our causal claim is that, if an instructor were to randomly assign half the class to do these tutorials and half to simply complete the reading, the half completing the tutorials would perform much better for the rest of the course.
Note that most of the tutorials follow the associated chapters from R for Data Science (2e). This is not true, however, for these tutorials: Introduction, RStudio and Code, RStudio and Github, Terminal, and Quarto. In those tutorials, we cover material which we feel belongs in any introductory data science course.
Installation
To install the package from CRAN:
install.packages("r4ds.tutorials")You can install the development version from GitHub with:
remotes::install_github("PPBDS/r4ds.tutorials")If R offers you the option to update some packages, you should do so. For packages that need compilation, feel free to answer “no.”
Then restart your R session or restart RStudio.
Accessing tutorials
In order to access the tutorials, start by loading the package.
You can access the tutorials via the Tutorial tab in the top right (Environment) pane in RStudio.
If either of the following is happening to you
- Cannot find the Tutorial pane
- Cannot find any r4ds tutorials
Then remember to restart your R session after installing the package.
Because tutorials within the Tutorial pane are sorted in alphabetical order by the name of the package, the r4ds.tutorials will be toward the bottom. Warning: There will usually be a bunch of learnr tutorials at the top of the Tutorial pane. Ignore those. They have nothing to do with this package. All tutorials from this package are labelled as r4ds.tutorials. If you don’t see any tutorials, try clicking the “Home” button – the little house symbol with the thin red roof in the upper right.
In order to expand the window, you can drag and enlarge the tutorial pane inside RStudio. In order to open a pop-up window, click the “Show in New Window” icon next to the home icon.
You may notice that the Jobs tab in the lower left will create output as the tutorial is starting up. This is because RStudio is running the code to create the tutorial. If you accidentally clicked “Start Tutorial” and would like to stop the job from running, you can click the back arrow in the Jobs tab, and then press the red stop sign icon. Your work will be saved between RStudio sessions, meaning that you can complete a tutorial in multiple sittings. Once you have completed a tutorial, follow the instructions on the tutorial Submit page and, if you’re a student, submit your answers as instructed.