2.1 Overview of resources

This part is intended to provide external resources that will help you in learning R. This part is divided into three sections: recommended packages, learning resources, and learning communities. The first section gives a list of commonly used packages that you may find useful in your research. These encompass a small subset of the thousands of packages available and will not include all the packages you will eventually need, but offers some recommended packages to get started.

The second section includes recommended learning resources including written materials, interactive tutorials, data sources, and sites to search. These resources only encompass a small number of the expanse of learning materials related to R. However, they offer a few places to get started to help learners avoid the overwhelm of too many learning options and nowhere to start.

The third section gives recommended learning communities. The worldwide R learning community is expansive and welcoming to learners at all levels. We hope you can find a community among those listed to interact and learn alongside other people interested in R.

Finally, an appendix is included offering numerous R package cheatsheets. Many packages have a cheatsheet designed for aiding quick understanding and use of functions. While I don’t recommend using these for learning R, they can be useful as a quick reference when working in R.