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C Study Group for R Contributors 2025

This is a study group meeting once a month for existing/aspiring R contributors who want to gain/refresh basic skills in C programming.

It will run from February to July 2025.

Woman studying in a library with books and a laptop

Study materials

The main study materials are from the C sessions of CS50, Harvard’s Introduction to Computer Science. This will be supplemented with a chapter from Deep R Programming on R’s C API.

Schedule

The study group will typically meet in the last week of the month.

Session Month Resource Material
1 Feb CS50 C
2 Mar CS50 Arrays
3 Apr CS50 Algorithms
4 May CS50 Memory
5 Jun CS50 Data Structures
6 Jul Deep R Interfacing compiled code [in R]

Commitment

Participants should study the material and attempt the corresponding exercises before each study group meeting.

A suggested weekly schedule for each month for the CS50 material is:

The additional practice problems are often harder than the problem set, however we suggest leaving the problem set till after the meetup and attempting this independently (this is expected if you are doing the course for credit).

There is the option to do further study towards a free certificate from Harvard or a verified certificate from edX (~200 USD, financial assistance program available on edX). See the CS50 website for details.

At study group meetings, participants should be prepared to share and discuss their work on the exercises.

Sessions

The study group will meet once a month. To accommodate participants in a wide range of time-zones, the C Study Group will run in three cohorts.

Note that the London times are GMT/UTC in winter and BST in summer, so please take care if/when the clocks change in your time zone. The events page shows actual times in your time zone, along with Google calendar and iCalendar links (the time zone on the calendar can be selected in its bottom-right corner).

Sign up to attend the sessions on the R Contributors Meetup.

Sessions will be recorded and shared on on the R Contributors Slack for people that can’t make the meetings.

Further help

Participants are encouraged to join the #c-study-group channel on the R Contributors Slack to discuss with others as they work through the material. CS50 also has communities on multiple platforms that you can connect to.