1.5 R resources

1.5.1 R Cheatsheets

The R reference card written by Tom Short is absolutely indispensable!

Figure 1.4: The R reference card written by Tom Short is absolutely indispensable!

Over the course of this book, you will be learning lots of new functions. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone created a Cheatsheet / Dictionary of many common R functions? Yes it would, and thankfully several friendly R programmers have done just that. Below is a table of some of them that I recommend. I highly encourage you to print these out and start highlighting functions as you learn them!

CheatSheet Author Link
R Basics Tom Short https://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Short-refcard.pdf
Advanced R Arianne Colton and Sean Chen hhttps://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/advancedR.pdf
Base R Mhairi McNeill http://github.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/raw/master/base-r.pdf
Strings RStudio https://github.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/raw/master/strings.pdf
Data import RStudio https://github.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/raw/master/data-import.pdf
Data transformation RStudio https://github.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/raw/master/data-import.pdf
RStudio application RStudio https://github.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/raw/master/rstudio-ide.pdf
Plotting with ggplot2 RStudio https://github.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/raw/master/data-visualization-2.1.pdf
RMarkdown RStudio https://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/rmarkdown-reference.pdf

1.5.2 Getting R help and inspiration online

Here are some great resources for R help and inspiration:

Site Description
www.google.com Seriously, Google is any programmer’s best friend. More likely than not you will be directed to www.stackoverflow.com or www.stackexchange.com
www.r-bloggers.com R bloggers is my go-to place to discover the latest and greatest with R.
blog.revolutionanalytics.com Revolution analytics always has great R related material.

1.5.3 Other R books

There are many, many excellent (non-pirate) books on R, some of which are available online for free. Here are some that I highly recommend:

Book Description
R for Data Science by Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham The best book to learn the latest tools for elegantly doing data science.
The R Book by Michael Crawley As close to an R bible as you can get.
Advanced R by Hadley Wickham A truly advanced book for expert R users, especially those with a programming background. Hadley Wickham is the R guru.
Discovering Statistics with R by Field, Miles and Field A classic text focusing on the theory and practice of statistical analysis with R
Applied Predictive Modeling by Kuhn and Johnson A great text specializing in statistical learning aka predictive modeling aka machine learning with R.