So, why learn R?

• R is a free and powerful programming language designed for data analysis, statistics, and visualization.
  It’s widely used in research, academia, and many professional fields — from economics and psychology to
  biology and the social sciences.

• Once you get familiar with it, you’ll see how much it can simplify your data work and help you later when
  learning other languages, such as Python. Mastering tools like R also opens up many future job opportunities
  in data-driven fields.

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Installation

I would kindly ask you to download R and Positron on your computers.

R

The latest version of R can be found at:
https://cran.r-project.org/
At this moment, it's called “Because it was There”.

Positron

Please follow this link:
https://positron.posit.co/download.html

If you're using your private laptops, I would recommend the "Setup.exe" file.

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R Packages

We will be installing the following packages, among others, together in our first session:

• tidyverse
• dplyr
• stringr
• ggplot2
• ggthemes
• ggrepel
• ggpubr
• ggpp
• ggtext
• GGally
• readxl
• readr
• eurostat
• giscoR
• viridis
• sf
• RColorBrewer
• reshape2
• jsonlite
• rjson
• rstatix
• lubridate
• gtsummary
• haven
• stargazer
• forcats
• magrittr
• gapminder
• maps
• mapproj
• modelsummary

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Optional: Install Packages in Advance

If you wish, you can already install the packages yourself by running the following code:

# List of packages
package_list = c(
  "tidyverse", "dplyr", "stringr", "forcats", "magrittr", "lubridate", "reshape2",
  "readxl", "readr", "haven", "jsonlite", "rjson", "eurostat", "gapminder",
  "ggplot2", "ggthemes", "ggrepel", "ggpubr", "ggpp", "ggtext", "GGally",
  "viridis", "RColorBrewer",
  "giscoR", "sf", "maps", "mapproj", "rnaturalearth",
  "modelsummary", "rstatix", "gtsummary", "stargazer"
)

# Installation
for(i in package_list){
  if(!require(i, character.only = TRUE)){
    install.packages(i, dependencies = TRUE)
    require(i, character.only = TRUE)
  }
}