This is a hands-on setup workshop—no slides or notebooks required. Just bring your laptop!
There are no prerequisites for this workshop. This session is designed for complete beginners.
Check out D-Lab's Workshop Catalog to browse all workshops, see what's running now, and review prerequisites.
This 2-hour session will help you get your R computing environment set up and introduce you to modern AI-assisted coding tools. Unlike traditional D-Lab workshops, this session is conversation-driven—we'll tailor guidance to your specific research goals and create space for questions throughout.
By the end of this workshop, you will have:
- A working installation of R and RStudio on your computer
- Visual Studio Code as an alternative editor for R (and other languages)
- Access to GitHub Copilot (free for students and educators)
- A clear path forward for continuing your R learning
After this workshop, you will be able to:
- Install R (the language) and RStudio (the IDE) on your operating system (Mac, Windows, or Linux).
- Understand the difference between R and RStudio.
- Navigate the RStudio interface: console, script editor, environment pane, and files pane.
- Install R packages using
install.packages(). - Create and run an R script.
- Set up Visual Studio Code as an alternative R environment.
- Use GitHub Copilot to assist with writing and understanding code.
- Think critically about the benefits and limitations of AI coding assistants.
This workshop does not cover the following:
- R programming fundamentals. This is covered in R Fundamentals.
- Advanced prompt engineering techniques. This is covered in Prompt Engineering.
- Machine learning with R. This is covered in R Machine Learning with tidymodels.
Please try to download the following before the workshop (but don't worry if you run into issues—that's what we're here for!):
| Software | Download Link |
|---|---|
| R (CRAN) | https://cran.r-project.org/ |
| RStudio Desktop | https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/ |
| Visual Studio Code | https://code.visualstudio.com/ |
| GitHub Education Pack | https://education.github.com/ |
Note: You must install R before installing RStudio. RStudio is an interface for R—it won't work without R installed first.
After this workshop, we recommend:
- R Fundamentals: Learn R syntax, data types, and the tidyverse.
- R Copilot Assisted Coding: Integrate AI tools into your R workflow.
- D-Lab Consulting: Get one-on-one help with your specific project.
D-Lab works with Berkeley faculty, research staff, and students to advance data-intensive social science and humanities research. Our goal at D-Lab is to provide practical training, staff support, resources, and space to enable you to use R for your own research applications. Our services cater to all skill levels, and no programming, statistical, or computer science backgrounds are necessary. We offer these services in the form of workshops, one-to-one consulting, and working groups that cover a variety of research topics, digital tools, and programming languages.
Visit the D-Lab homepage to learn more about us. You can view our calendar for upcoming events, learn about how to utilize our consulting and data services, and check out upcoming workshops.
| Workshop | Description |
|---|---|
| R Fundamentals | Introduction to R syntax and the tidyverse |
| R Data Wrangling | Data manipulation with dplyr and tidyr |
| R Data Visualization | Creating plots with ggplot2 |
| R Machine Learning with tidymodels | Introduction to machine learning in R |