Elements of Data Science
SDS 322E

H. Sherry Zhang
Department of Statistics and Data Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin

Fall 2025

Learning objectives

  • Being able to work with an R Markdown document — Your labs/HWs/Projects will be provided in this format, and you’ll need to knit them into a PDF for submission.
  • Of cause, you will need to have R and RStudio installed, and know how to install packages.

Hi - I’m an R script!

https://github.com/tidyverse/dplyr/blob/main/R/summarise.R

  • Code is first class citizens here and all the text and comments need to start with # (#' is a special symbol used for package documentation).

Hi - I’m a Markdown document!

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tidyverse/dplyr/refs/heads/main/README.md

  • Text are first class citizens here. Generally you won’t interact with me directly in this class but I lay the foundation for R Markdown documents.

(The first line says README.md is generated from README.Rmd. Please edit that file)

Hi - I’m an R Markdown document!

File > New File > Quarto Document / R Markdown

  • I will be the document you mainly work with in this class.

  • I’m more powerful than the previous two guys because I can

    • include both text and code (in code chunks),
    • run the code to produce output, and
    • render the results to multiple formats such as HTML, PDF, and Word.

Actually, I may be more powerful than you think. With me, you can:

  1. Write documents, papers, and books: https://r4ds.hadley.nz/

Most of the references/books in this class are written R Markdown (or its newer generation - Quarto).

Actually, I may be more powerful than you think. With me, you can:

  1. Create HTML or PDF slides - like these slides:

Actually, I may be more powerful than you think. With me, you can:

  1. Build a personal website and write blogs : https://www.dicook.org/

Your time

install.packages("usethis")
usethis::create_from_github("SDS322E-2025Fall/0102-welcome", fork = FALSE)