Resources

The main two resources for this class are:

• Statistical Thinking for the 21st Century, online textbook.
• Statistical Thinking for the 21st Century, R Companion.

These two references should be your go-to material. You will also be offered extra credit for submitting corrections or suggestions to the online textbooks.
If you would like to go further, here are just a few curated resources that should be helpful for the course.

Resources for learning statistics

• OpenIntro Statistics
• Textbook: Statistics, 4th edition by Freedman, Pisani & Purves.

Resources for learning R

There are a ton of people interested in learning R these days, and a lot of resources have popped up to help out:

• A Student’s Guide to R
• R for cats: A humorous introduction to R programming
• aRrgh: a newcomer’s (angry) guide to R
• Quick-R
• RStudio Cheat Sheets: Quick references for many different aspects of R programming
• tidverse Style Guide: Make your code beautiful and reader-friendly!
• Datacamp: Offers online courses for many aspects of R programming. Students interested in the paid R course can receive a free license by registering using this link.
• R for Data Science: This free online book focuses on working with data in R.
• Advanced R: This free online book by Hadley Wickham will help you get to the next level once your R skills start to develop.
• R intro for Python users: Used Python before? Check this out for a guide on how to transition to R.

Solving problems

If you encounter an error when learning to program in R, it’s almost certain that someone else has encountered the same problem in the past. Usually, pasting the text of the error message into a Google search is sufficient to help find the answer.

Sources for interesting datasets

The TAs have identified many interesting and easier to manipulate datasets here. In addition, we can recommend:

• data.gov
• Other governmental or NGO open data websites, e.g. City of Palo Alto, State of California, World Bank
• data.world
• kaggle
• Awesome public datasets
• American Psychological Association - links to datasets
• Google Dataset Search: A tool for searching for open datasets
• Data Is Plural: A weekly newsletter of interesting datasets
• Data which you have collected yourself.

R Notebooks

• Using R Markdown for Class Reports - this is a great guide to formatting documents using R Markdown, which is the language used for RStudio Notebooks.