Learning more/Getting help
More courses/books
If you want more material than is covered in this course, there are lots of different introductions to R out there, many of them free.
My number one recommendation is the book R for Data Science, written by Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham (who we met at the start of the course). It’s a comprehensive and accessible intro that covers visualization, data wrangling and analysis, all using modern R tools to make things as easy as possible.
R for Data Science
Other good resources include:
- swirl, an interactive tutorial for R.
- The R Graph Gallery: lots of cool examples of different plots.
- The R Graphics Cookbook, which has a huge number
of examples of useful plots, mostly in
ggplot2. - Any of the other books listed on bookdown.org.
- The R courses on DataCamp, which have a cool interactive system that tests you as you go. Most are paid but there are free trials to test it out.
Checking out the R community
- If you’re on Twitter, check out the #rstats hashtag.
- Check out R Bloggers, which collects blog posts from a huge number of different R blogs.
Getting help
If you’re stuck with your R code, the best option is to ask someone you know who knows R - some problems can be solved very quickly with a nudge in the right direction from someone who’s experienced them before.
Stack Overflow is a resource used by programmers the world over. Lots of experienced programmers are happy to answer questions on there to keep their skills sharp and earn useless points (I have a lot of these useless points). The trick to asking a question on Stack Overflow is:
- Do a few google searches for your question before heading to Stack Overflow. The answer you need might pop up (and will often already be on Stack Overflow).
- Carefully read the guide to creating a reproducible example for your question.
- Try to write a question that includes both the code you’re already tried, and a copy-pasteable version of your dataset.
Stack Overflow works best for small, self-contained coding questions, with an objective answer. If you have a broader question that involves a bit more opinion, you may want to try on the RStudio Community forum.