Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: min

Questions

• What do I do after the workshop to apply what I learned and keep learning more?

• How do I deal with coding errors (i.e. debug)?

Objectives

• Learn how to get help with code via the Internet and reaching out to others.

Contents

1. Workshop summary & moving forward
2. Learning more and getting help
   1. The Internet
   2. Reach out to others
   3. Code club

Workshop summary & moving forward

Congratulations on completing the workshop! You learned some basic procedures for importing, managing, visualizing and reporting your data. The absolute best way to continue improving your skills is to use R in your own work, e.g. to automate a task, to analyze data, or to create reports.

Brainstorm session: how to use R as much as possible

How can you use R in your work to be able to keep improving your skills?

Solution:

Is there a task you can automate, data you wish to analyze or visualize, or reports that you need to make?

As you continue on your coding journey, you will want to learn new data processing and analysis techniques.

As we complete the course, we want to share with you some tips and tricks that have helped us on our own programming journeys.

Learning more and getting help

The Internet

The Internet is your best friend.

If you get stuck, use your favorite search engine to look for an answer to your question. An example is “how to import an excel spreadsheet into R.” Typically, you will find step-by-step online documentation that you can adapt for your own purposes.

If you want to learn something new, use your favorite search engine to look for tutorials and other resources related to the topic.

Additional coding topics

There are some coding concepts that we did not have time to cover in this workshop, but are important to learn as you continue on your journey and begin to perform more sophisticated data analysis projects. We’ve provided some links below, but feel free to search for other explanations and tutorials as well.

• Lists
• Functions
• Conditionals
• Loops and apply statements

Here is a nice tutorial on conditionals, loops, and functions all together.

Domain-specific analyses

We encourage you to investigate domain-specific packages and software that will help you perform specific tasks related to your own research. You can find these packages through:

• Other people in the field.
• Internet searches with keywords related to the topic of interest, including R (the programming language you’re interested in using; e.g. “find pairwise distances for DNA sequences in R”).

Reach out to others

We want to be a resource for you after the workshop ends, and we also want you all to be a resource for each other.

You can email us whenever you want with questions! If it’s a quick thing, we can figure out over email, otherwise we can set up a time to chat.

Here are our emails:

• Zena: zena.lapp@duke.edu
• Christine: christine.markwalter@duke.edu

What to include when asking for help

1. A brief summary of what you are trying to accomplish (your ultimate goal, distilled into one specific question).
2. Brief description of what you’ve tried so far.
3. Description of the problem you’re having - the exact code you used, the expected output, the actual error/output.
4. A minimal, reproducible example. Include the code and data (or made-up data) you need to reproduce the error.

Code club

For additional consistent support, we will be hosting a monthly virtual code club where we will discuss different coding topics and troubleshoot issues you may be having with your own data. Please let us know if you would like to participate.

Key Points

• Using R regularly is the best way to improve your skills.

• When it comes to trying to figure out how to code something, and debugging, Internet searching is your best friend.

• Don’t be afraid to reach out to others and ask for help.