In AndySouth/rmapteach:

Hello All,

I'm looking forward to teaching the course next week.

It's fine that we will have participants with different existing experience with R and there will be material for different levels. I'll encourage you to take things at your own pace with plenty of hands-on time.

However, that said, I will not have time in the session to address issues about installing R, RStudio or the recomended packages. You'll need to get that done beforehand.

So, before the course could you do the following A) Essential and B) Helpful things :

A) Essential Have R and RStudio installed (links from here : https://www.rstudio.com/online-learning/#R)

Be familiar with R basics OR have gone through chapters 1 & 2 at http://tryr.codeschool.com/

Install these packages with this command from R : install.packages(c("ggplot2","tmap","leaflet"), dependencies=TRUE)

B) Helpful for more advanced

You have the latest version of R (3.3.1)

If you are bringing your own data, have it already read into R (using read.csv or similar) as a dataframe with named columns. I will have limited time to address data import or formatting issues. There will be example data for you to work with too.

Best wishes, Andy

To say at the start of the session

I will inevitably assume that you know things that you don't, and at some points will assume that you don't know things that you do. I apologise and do feel free to point this out to me.
You don't have to keep all this stuff in your head. Just 2 days ago Hadley Wickham tweeted that he can't code without access to the internet to look stuff up. Stackoverflow is amazing. I (and others) have looked up things on there only to find I answered the question myself a few years ago.
I tend to follow a trial and error approach, I don't fully understand everything that I'm doing