Phew, that well-and-truly brings us to the end of this workshop. I hope it has been useful and fairly straight forward to follow. As I keep mentioning we’re only just scratching the surface of what you can do with R, but hopefully it opens your eyes to go out and explore further. The hardest part is getting over the initial hurdle; the fact that R is a programming language and there aren’t any ‘nice’ buttons to click. But once you start to get a feel for how things work it’s like the lights go on; error messages are no longer scary, you gain a deeper understanding of your data, and you’ll start writing R scripts for numerous tasks.fn34
I’m hoping that it becomes possible in the future to offer a course or two that will delve deeper into Bioconductor and the packages/applications that are involved with genomics and bioinformatics analysis. I know there are a few people out there that are/have/will be doing this sort of analysis, and in my opinion this is where R really begins to shine.fn35
One of the things I’ve wanted to do for a while is create a communal blog or electronic workbook that everyone could access. This could be used as a place for people to post questions, problems, advice, useful links, resources, code, etc. For example, you’re working on a piece of code and something is just not working, post on the blog and get the help of others. I know that there are many much bigger blogs out there, but it’s nice to field questions to people you know initially.fn35 I think now that we’ve been through one of these workshops as a group everyone will hopefully feel comfortable with each other – and it’s nice with everyone at a very similar level of skill. This is just a thought; let me know what you all think.
UPDATE: I followed through with the above idea and created a free blog at http://guru.forumotion.co.nz/. Please feel free to sign up and browse the currently available content, post questions, add helpful insights etc. I’m going to try and add a whole lot more content in the next month or so (as time allow...).
Well, I hope you enjoyed the workshop, learnt a little something and don’t have too much of a sore head. All going well we hope to run more workshops in the near future.
--Miles
P.S. any feedback is appreciated, such as; what was good, what was bad, too easy, too hard, couldn’t understand, got sick of footnotes...
**Contact:** miles.benton84@gmail.com or m.benton@qut.edu.au
fn34. Who knows, this might even lead you to other languages – and Unix/Linux based systems if you haven’t used them before. ↩
fn35. we are currently in planning stages for a series of genomics based workshops. These will be structured along the lines of: introduction to R and genomic analysis, manipulating genomic data, R: a foundation for microarray analysis, GWAS analysis in R, Gene expression analysis in R, Methylation analysis in R, batch scripting genomic analyses. ↩
fn36. Sometimes it saves a little embarrassment – old hands on the mailing lists can get quite sarcastic. ↩