A Minimalist R Cheatsheet for NGS Biology

While teaching R to biologists, a common complaint I hear is that “there are too many functions”. Therefore, I decided to take a minimalist approach and not teach students new functions unless those are absolutely necessary. Using existing functions for new tasks has two benefits - (i) it keeps the brain clutter-free from too many function names, (ii) it gives students more practice on the existing functions thus reinforcing their knowledge.

Here is a minimalist cheatsheet for NGS data analysis. The choice of functions may make most sense, if you join our remotely taught bioinformatics classes. In any case, posting it publicly cannot hurt, and maybe others will incorporate this material in their teaching.

I am continuing to work on this file with the primary objective of removing materials. You may notice that for statistical analysis and plot, this file includes only the basic functions. I plan to cover those topics in two separate minimalist cheatsheets.

Once again, if you are an expert in R or hang around with experts only, this file is like skiiing on bunny hills. You are advised to stay away or otherwise you will cause an accident.