Summary and Schedule

This is a lesson about how to use the targets R package for maintaining efficient data analysis workflows.

Prerequisite

Prerequisites

This lesson assumes some familiarity with the R programming language, such as that covered in R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis.

	Setup Instructions	Download files required for the lesson
Duration: 00h 00m	1. Introduction	Why should we care about reproducibility? How can targets help us achieve reproducibility?
Duration: 00h 13m	2. First targets Workflow	What are best practices for organizing analyses? What is a _targets.R file for? What is the content of the _targets.R file? How do you run a workflow?
Duration: 01h 03m	3. A Brief Introduction to Functions	What are functions? Why should we know how to write them? What are the main components of a function?
Duration: 01h 33m	4. Loading Workflow Objects	Where does the workflow happen? How can we inspect the objects built by the workflow?
Duration: 01h 48m	5. The Workflow Lifecycle	What happens if we re-run a workflow? How does targets know what steps to re-run? How can we inspect the state of the workflow?
Duration: 02h 18m	6. Best Practices for targets Project Organization	What are best practices for organizing targets projects? How does the organization of a targets workflow differ from a script-based analysis?
Duration: 02h 38m	7. Managing Packages	How should I manage packages for my targets project?
Duration: 02h 58m	8. Branching	How can we specify many targets without typing everything out?
Duration: 03h 48m	9. Parallel Processing	How can we build targets in parallel?
Duration: 04h 03m	10. Working with External Files	How can we load external data?
Duration: 04h 38m	11. Reproducible Reports with Quarto	How can we create reproducible reports?
Duration: 05h 13m	Finish

The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.

Follow these instructions to install the required software on your computer.

• Download and install the latest version of R. This lesson requires R version 4.5.0 or later, because the penguins data we use is included in base R starting with that version.
• Download and install RStudio. RStudio is an application (an integrated development environment or IDE) that facilitates the use of R and offers a number of nice additional features, including the Quarto publishing system. You will need the free Desktop version for your computer.
• Install the necessary R packages with the following command:

R

install.packages(
  c(
    "crew",
    "quarto",
    "tarchetypes",
    "targets",
    "tidyverse",
    "visNetwork"
  )
)