Project Structure

• ~15 Minutes

Learning Objectives

• Project or Script
• Working Directory
• Folder Structure
• Documentation
  • Introduction to Markdown
  • Formatting Markdown

Drawing of the Titanic gymnasium

Project or Script

Thus far, everything we have worked with scripts. Today, we work with projects. An R project:

• is a way to divide work into multiple contexts.
• is a folder containing a collection of code, data, etc.
• has a root directory and R must know what this is.
• is easy to to handle in Rstudio.

Paperboy Ned Parfett, Soldier and Paperboy

RStudio Project (1/3)

Let's make a new project!

• File -> New Project
• Three options
  • New Directory
  • Existing Directory
  • Version Control
• Select the first option.
  Version Control must be installed separately and is not something we can cover today.

RStudio Project (2/3)

• Create an Empty Project
• I promise, you don't want to do either of the others.

RStudio Project (3/3)

• Directory Name: foo
• ~ is your home directory
• If you don't know what git is, don't start a repository.
  
  If you do, RStudio will instantiate an empty git repo at the project root.
• If you open in a new session, RStudio will open a new window.

Our New Project

R version 3.3.3 (2017-03-06) -- "Another Canoe"
Copyright (C) 2017 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu (64-bit)

Type 'demo()' for some demos, 'help()' for on-line help, or
'help.start()' for an HTML browser interface to help.
Type 'q()' to quit R.

> getwd()
[1] "/home/andy/foo"
    

• Please find the folder you created.
• You should find a file called foo.Rproj
• This is a RStudio specific file.

Your Turn! (1/3)

## Load some data:
data(cars)


## Look at it:
str(cars)
head(cars)
?cars

## Play with it: 
colMeans(cars)
plot(cars$speed, cars$dist)
    

Your Turn! (2/3)

• Save the file as my_cars.R. What happens?
• What does the following code return? Does it make sense?

getwd()
    

Your Turn! (3/3)

• Close RStudio and restart it.
• See how to open specific projects.

Folder Structure (1/2)

• You can make up your own project structure.
• Project structure used today is modeled on R packages.
• I use a similar structure when working in R.
• Goals:
  • Separates data management from data analysis.
  • Emphasizes documentation and reproducibity.
  • Compatible with version control sites like GitHub.

Folder Structure (2/2)

Root Project Folder (foo):

• data-raw/
  • README.md
  • something_awesome.R
• data/
  • README.md
  • something_awesome.Rda
• R/
  • README.R
  • awesome_function.R
• README.md
• explore.R
• some_awesome_analysis.R

Documentation

• Start your R journey with documentation!
  - All .md files are documentation.
  - The file name README.md is a convention.
• This is actually REALLY important.
• You can write your documentation in many tools, like Word. But, it doesn't translate well to the web.
• Markdown - The plain text way to format your life.

Introducing Markdown

• Daring Fireball
• Allows authors/programmers to write in an easy-to-read plain-text format which can be converted to other formats like HTML, LaTeX, etc.
• Widely adopted & extended.
• Programmers REALLY like plain text.
• A derivative, RMarkdown, can be used to create reproducible reports.

Formatting Markdown

# Heading 1

## Heading 2

Just write some text to create a paragraph. Just leave a space between your paragraph and other objects like headers or lists.

- Bullett List Item 1
- Bullett List Item 2
- Bullett List Item 3

Another paragraph. Lorem ipsum . . .

Next Up

Demo Project: Take Five!