Preparation for the R courses at JLU Giessen, SoSe 2025

Author

Affiliations

Stefan Th. Gries

UC Santa Barbara

JLU Giessen

1 Installation and preparation

For the courses during the summer semester 2025, you will ideally prepare your computers in three simple ways:

1. you need to have R installed;
2. ideally, you’d have Quarto installed;
3. you need to have RStudio installed;
4. you need to have a working directory set up.

This document explains how to do these things.

1.1 Installing R

To install R, please do the following:

• go to the website at https://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html and pick a location from where to download R; this will lead you to a website that looks like this:

Figure 1: CRAN

• on that page, pick the download page for your computer’s operating system, likely that will be
  • the link for R for Microsoft Windows;
  • the link for R for Mac OS;
• if you’re using Microsoft Windows, you then
  • click on the link that says “This is what you want to install R for the first time” and then
  • click on the link that says “Download R-4.xxx for Windows”, which probably looks like this and will download R to your computer (probably your Downloads folder):

Figure 2: CRAN: R for Windows

• if you’re using Mac OS, the page you got to probably looks like this and you can click on the link for your version of Mac OS; most likely that will be the one that says “For Apple silicon (M1, 2, …) Macs: R-4.xxx-arm64.pkg”

Figure 3: CRAN: R for MacOS

• in either case, you will find the downloaded version of R in your Downloads folder and can then install it from there by doing what your operating system requires for installations (you can use all the default settings for the installation).

1.2 Installing Quarto

To install Quarto, please do the following:

• go to the website at https://quarto.org and click “Get Started”:

Figure 4: Quarto

• you will then get to the Download page, which should look something like this:

Figure 5: Quarto

• then, pick the installer for your operating system, click on it to download it, and install it from there by doing what your operating system requires for installations (you can use all the default settings for the installation).

1.3 Preparing RStudio

1.3.1 Installing RStudio

To install RStudio, please do the following:

• go to the website at https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/; this will lead you to a website that looks like this:

Figure 6: POSIT: RStudio Desktop

• scroll down to where it says “2: Install RStudio”, which will look like this:

Figure 7: RStudio: Choose installer

• then, pick the installer for your operating system, click on it to download it, and install it from there by doing what your operating system requires for installations (you can use all the default settings for the installation).

1.3.2 Configuring RStudio

Once RStudio has been downloaded, there are a few settings that you should set for what I think is often the best work environment:

• launch RStudio and click on “Tools”:

Figure 8: RStudio: Menu bar

• then click on “Global Options…”, which will lead to a window looking like this, where we will tweak settings in several tabs:

Figure 9: RStudio: Global Options

• on the “General” tab, make the highlighted settings look like this:

Figure 10: RStudio: Global Options: General

• on the “Code” tab, make the highlighted settings look like this:

Figure 11: RStudio: Global Options: Code: Edit

• on the “Code” tab, switch to the “Display” tab and make the highlighted settings look like this:

Figure 12: RStudio: Global Options: Code: Display

• on the “Pane Layout” tab, choose the 4 highlighted values in the dropdown menus like this:

Figure 13: RStudio: Global Options: Pane layout

1.3.3 Install the package magrittr

Finally, we will install one important package, the package magrittr. To do that, please

• launch RStudio and click on “Tools” again, then on “Install Packages…”;
• there, make sure that the highlighted things are defined as follows:
  • choose “Repository (CRAN) at the top;
  • enter “magrittr” in the middle;
  • below that, the “Install to Library” should end with “(Default)”;
  • tick “Install dependencies” at the bottom;

Figure 14: RStudio: Global Options: Install Packages

• then click “Install” and wait till it’s done.

2 Creating working directories for the course(s)

Download the file for your course from my website, put the zip file somewhere where you store stuff on your computer you want to be able to find and access regularly – meaning, don’t let it rot in your download folder – and then properly unzip it (probably right-click on it and say “extract all” or whatever your OS needs). The resulting folder(s) for this/each course is where you should put all additional files I will make available for each course.