Data analysis in R and Python

Author

Hugo Tavares and Martin van Rongen

Published

July 28, 2025

These sessions provide an introduction to coding in R and Python. The aim is to get you comfortable with coding techniques commonly used in scientific research.

Learning objectives
  • Get familiar with the R or Python programming language
  • Learn to visualise data
  • Be able to manipulate and transform data

Target audience

This course is aimed at people without any prior programming experience. It does however, allow people with some experience to further enhance their knowledge through different level exercises.

Prerequisites

No prerequisites.

Exercises

Exercises in these materials are labelled according to their level of difficulty:

Level Description
Exercises in level 1 are simpler and designed to get you familiar with the concepts and syntax covered in the course.
Exercises in level 2 combine different concepts together and apply it to a given task.
Exercises in level 3 require going beyond the concepts and syntax introduced to solve new problems.

Citation & authors

Please cite these materials if:

  • You adapted or used any of them in your own teaching.
  • These materials were useful for your research work. For example, you can cite us in the methods section of your paper: “We carried our analyses based on the recommendations in YourReferenceHere”.

You can cite these materials as:

Tavares, H., van Rongen, M. (2025). Data analysis in R and Python. https://cambiotraining.github.io/data-analysis-in-r-and-python/

Or in BibTeX format:

@misc{YourReferenceHere,
  author = {Tavares, Hugo and van Rongen, Martin},
  month = {6},
  title = {Data analysis in R and Python},
  url = {https://cambiotraining.github.io/data-analysis-in-r-and-python/},
  year = {2025}
}

About the authors:

  • Hugo Tavares
    Affiliation: Cambridge Centre for Research Informatics Training
    Roles: writing - original draft; conceptualisation; software
  • Martin van Rongen
    Affiliation: Cambridge Centre for Research Informatics Training
    Roles: writing - original draft; conceptualisation; software

Acknowledgements

Some parts of these materials are loosely based on the original course contents of the “Data Carpentry lesson in Ecology”, as released by Michonneau et al. (2019).