Stage 2 – A language, an IDE, and a document to write in

All three modules here are foundations, and each can be skipped by anyone who already has it. If you write R but have never written Quarto, do the third and not the second; if you have used RStudio for years and are curious what has changed, the IDE module is the one to read.

Work through	What you do	Timing
Setup	Install R and an IDE (Positron, RStudio, VS Code, etc.) and download the workspace, which is yours to keep. Working alone, open the browser lab as well: it runs the same exercise in a tab with nothing installed, and it is the place to carry on if the installation fails and there is no one to rescue it. The help page is the other place to turn, with the problems that others have met, their fixes, and prompts you can give an AI assistant.	30 minutes
Positron, RStudio and VS Code	Section 1, the section on the IDE you chose, and the six steps of section 6 in the workspace.	45 minutes
Getting started with R	All eleven sections: the console and the script, objects and data frames, reading a CSV, the pipe, three dialects for one task, the grammar of graphics, and the class chart read layer by layer. Do the “Try it” boxes as you reach them.	3 hours
Quarto and reproducible documents	What a .qmd file is and what rendering does to it, the YAML header, chunk options, figures and tables with cross-references, and citations resolved from a bibliography file. The code on the page is displayed but not executed, so type its examples into a document of your own as you go.	2 hours

By the end of the stage you have a workspace that runs on your own machine, in an IDE whose panes you know, and one rendered document of your own containing a figure made by code, a cross-reference to it and a citation resolved from a bibliography file.