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What is R4DEV?
R4DEV is a practical, open workshop for reproducible data analysis, visualisation, publishing, interactive applications, AI-assisted workflows, and statistical reasoning – all using R. It grew out of training a constantly rotating team at the OECD, and every lesson is built the same way: download real data from the web, then build something you can look at – a plot, a map, an animation, an app, a chatbot.
There is no lecture track separate from the code. Each lesson is a single page you read top to bottom, running the code as you go, with practice exercises at the end to check what stuck.
Who is it for?
Analysts, researchers, economists, policy professionals, development practitioners, and students who already have some reason to work with data in R – a thesis, a report, a dashboard – and want a practical, project-based way in, rather than a syntax reference.
What should I know already?
R4DEV does not assume you are a complete beginner to programming, and it does not teach R’s core syntax (variables, functions, control flow) from scratch.
- Minimum prerequisites: you can open a
.Ror.qmdfile in RStudio and run a line of code. That’s it to start lesson 1. - Helpful prior knowledge: basic data-frame operations (reading a CSV, filtering rows, computing a summary) make lessons 2 onward noticeably faster, though Everything in its right place introduces the tidyverse pipe as it goes.
- Taught from scratch, no prior exposure assumed: Quarto publishing, ggplot2, animation, mapping, web scraping, Shiny, LLM tool calling, retrieval-augmented generation, causal diagrams, and Bayesian updating.
- Assumes basic R familiarity, not re-taught: variable assignment, calling a function, installing a package, and reading an error message. If none of that is familiar yet, work through RStudio’s own primers or the free R for Data Science book first – R4DEV picks up from there.
Complete beginners to R can absolutely take this workshop, but should expect lesson 1 to take longer than the estimate while the RStudio interface and basic syntax become familiar.
What should I install?
How does the workshop work?
- Three tracks – Build with R, Work with AI, Think with data – each a self-contained sequence of lessons.
- Every lesson is a guided, worked example on real data, not an abstract exercise – you run the same code the page shows.
- Code chunks carry numbered annotations (hover over the numbers next to the code) that explain what each line does in context.
- Each lesson ends with practice exercises at three difficulty levels (Basic, Intermediate, Advanced) so you can stop at the depth that suits you.
- Some sections are marked optional/advanced – callouts flag them, and skipping them never blocks a later lesson.
- If you want, start your own project (a thesis, a blog, a report) alongside the workshop and apply each lesson to it directly – see the note at the end of About R4DEV.