Programming skills are becoming more and more important for researchers to effectively collect, analyse, and translate data into publication-ready insights and figures. But it can be difficult to 'take the plunge' and learn those first steps. This practical, follow-along workshop is aimed at those who are completely new to programming, and introduces the R programming language for data analysis. Participants will learn about the most important concepts for starting with R, including setting up a project in R, basic programming principles, reading in data, summarising and subsetting data, and creating basic plots. We aim to give participants a brief overview of what is possible with R and to inspire them to continue learning. Participants will be expected to follow along and will be provided with set up instructions in advance, which must be completed before the workshop. For a slightly more in-depth look at plotting in R, see "Data Storytelling with R and ggplot", and for statistical analyses with R, see "Hands-on Statistical Analysis with R".
