Some tips on getting started:
- Download R here
- After you install R, I recommend you install RStudio. RStudio is a program that makes R easier to use, and is being widely adopted by both beginning and advanced R users. Importantly, it works across most computer platforms, and has features that make it easy to share your work, collaborate, and do proper version control.
- Google is your first stop for most questions. You’ll most likely reach most of the resources below while searching for your specific question.
- Our regular R work sessions and listserv are great places to ask questions, especially if you are not sure what you are looking for.
Web Resources
Everyone learns R differently, for different purposes. Thus, you’ll probably need to learn specialized packages for your field or application. Resources and books here are general-purpose, with some bent towards ecological statistics applications.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Here are lists of beginner’s resources which others have compiled. R tools evolve rapidly, though, so be sure to check that your guide is up-to-date!
- Rseek is a search engine for R resources.
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RStudio’s Getting Help with R page or online learning page.
- Beginner tips from Revolution Analytics
- A free online course from Coursera
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For more advanced usage, Hadley Wickham’s Advanced R is a free e-book and he is also writing a book on creating R packages
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Online materials from an R-based ecological statistics course from UNC.
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Jenny Bryan’s excellent Data wrangling course STAT545 (all materials and code openly available)
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Ethan White’s semester course Data Carpentry Course for Biologists
- RStudio cheatsheets for anything & everything
Books
- R in a nutshell by Joseph Adler is a good book that’s available in the Davis library and online for Davis users.
- Ecological Models and Data with R by Ben Bolker.
- The freely available Modern Diver: An intro to statistical and data sciences in R by Chester Ismay and Albert Y. Kim
- A great and in depth book by Hadley Wickham & Garrett Grolemund: R for Data Science
- The Art of R Programming
- Introductory R
- A Primer of Ecology with R by M. Henry H. Stevens is also available online
Other Mailing Lists, Discussion Boards and Resources
These mailing list are very useful not just as a place to ask questions. They are probably where you will find your answers when you search on Google.
- The R-Help mailing list and it’s many subgroups, including an Ecology-specific group
- Stack Overflow is a popular Q&A site for computer programming that a lot of discussions about R.
- The Davis Scientific and Statistical Computing List is mostly used by advanced users and includes some of the developers of R.
Miscellaneous
- R-bloggers
- The One R Tip A Day Twitter Account
- #rstats is a common hashtag for discussing R on Twitter