Software Requirements & Setup Instructions

To fully participate in this course you will need access to the free open source software described below on your own laptop (N.B. You may need Administer privileges/permissions to install some of these).

Supported web browser We require an up-to-date web browser (current versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari are preferred).

R and RStudio: Module 2 will use R in order to demonstrate data analyses. R can be downloaded and installed from CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network). If possible download the latest version of R. As of course launch (Jan 17) the latest release (2016-10-31, Sincere Pumpkin Patch) is R-3.3.2.

We recommend using RStudio desktop, a slick visual interface for R.

Note that we use R in this course for several reasons:

• R is open-source and freely available for Mac, PC, and Linux machines. This means that there is no restriction on having to license a particular software program, or have students work in a specific lab that has been outfitted with the technology of choice.
• R is user-extensible and user extensions can easily be made available to others.
• R is commercial quality. It is the package of choice for many statisticians and those who use statistics frequently.
• R is very popular in the field of bioinformatics, especially in certain sub-disciplines, like genomics and structural bioinformatics.
• R is very powerful. Furthermore, it is gaining new features every day. New statistical methods are often available first in R.