EsCHER’s R-evolution: Mastering R Package Development for Health Economics

👋 Welcome to EsCHER’s R-evolution

Welcome to the workshop “Mastering R Package Development for Health Economics” with Gianluca Baio.

In this 1-day workshop, we will learn more about how to develop an R package for health economics and to what extend developing your own package can be be useful for your research.

📚 Course Material

To get most out of this workshop, we recommend you to read up on couple of things before you attend:

  • If you are not familiar with the basic syntax of R, we recommend you to read the Introduction to R from the R documentation.
  • If you want to read-up on anything related to Data Science and R, we recommend you to read R for Data Science (2e) by Hadley Wickham, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Garrett Grolemund.
  • If you are not familiar with functions in R, we recommend you to read Chapter 6 Functions from the book Advanced R by Hadley Wickham.

📝 Pre-workshop checklist

For more details on the different aspects look at the pre-class tab!

Must-haves

Before you attend the workshop, please make sure you have the following things ready:

  • R and RStudio: Make sure you have R and RStudio installed on your computer. You can download R from here and RStudio from here.

  • Think about a case example that you would like to work during this workshop for developing an R package. It can be a simple example, but it should be something that you are familiar with and that you can use as a case study for the workshop. Please make sure that you ideas on writing some own functions for this case study. These could be functions that you already created or you come-up with new ones.

Nice to haves

The following things are not mandatory, but they will make your life easier during the workshop. We are aware that the EUR IT-policy might not allow you to install these things on your computer easily, but we still recommend you to have them installed if you want to get most out of the workshop.

  • R Packages: Make sure you have the following R packages installed: devtools, roxygen2, testthat, usethis

  • Git: Make sure you have Git installed on your computer. You can download Git from here or the EUR software center.

  • GitHub Account: Make sure you have a GitHub account. If you don’t have one, you can create one here. In any case, we strongly recommend to upgrade to a free teachers account to get free private repositories and other benefits such as GitHub Copilot. It takes some hurdles to get the teacher account, so we recommend you to start the process as soon as possible. It is worth it!

  • Install GitHub Desktop: GitHub Desktop is a graphical user interface for GitHub. You can download GitHub Desktop from here.