BIO331 – Lab 01: Prerequisites

Setting up in preparation for next week

Author

Dee Ruttenberg (Adapted from Scott Wolf, Michelle White)

Published

January 21, 2026

Prerequisites

This course focuses on the R and Unix programming languages, with a main focus on R. Git will also be taught and used for the assignments. A good code editor and environment (Vscode or Rstudio) is also necessary.
Your take-off will be much easier if you can install all these on your computer before the first precept.

R

Here are instructions to install R on Windows, Mac and Linux. This includes downloading R from CRAN. Linux users might install R directly with their package manager, such as apt.
Please check you can run a simplistic “hello, world” script on your Python installation.

Text editor / IDE

Standard usage is to develop code in an integrated development environment (IDE), rather than a simple text editor (though some still use old school editors such as neovim and emacs). We advise to install an IDE, as they show complex code highlighting, can run and help debug code, and connects to AI and git tools.

We suggest Rstudio, as it is the best for data visualization and analysis in R. See here for installation on all OS.

One of the most popular IDEs is VsCode. Vscode has plugins/extensions for many languages, including those for R – you will find it especially useful in the later half of the class, especially if you do final project 1.

Github

You should also set up a github account and install git locally. For easier interaction with github repositories, it is also advised to setup a SSH authentification key: follow instructions here.