R starter resources

I’m hardly the first person you would want to talk to about learning statistics in R. But if you’re bent on teaching yourself R, and you’ve ended up at my blog, here are some resources I found useful. (No opinions here about whether R is good/bad better/worse than Excel, Minitab, Matlab, Octave, SPSS, Stata, SAS, or others.)

R Rroject is the mothership.

Rstudio is an IDE for R, which provides a better GUI for some basic tasks. Most of what you’d expect from a modern IDE: syntax highlighting, GUI commands for loading and saving data, setting the working directory, separate panes for help files.

UCLA tutorials are a well written introduction to basic data entry, functions, and graphics in R. There are similar tutorials for Stata and other languages here as well.

Quick-R is a blog and a book written by a statistician for people switching from SPSS and Stata to R. Excellent and concise website detailing all of the basics: data entry, functions, plots, and how to think about all of the above.

R help list and archives are a way to ask questions of experienced users. You’ll get excellent help here, but it’s important to respect the etiquette. Basically, (1) read the package manual, (2) work up a minimal example with your question, and (3) be extremely precise about the data you have and the data you want, as opposed to the way you’re trying to solve that problem. This will become clearer if you read a few discussions in the archives.

StackExchange is a glorified bulletin board for programmers exchanging help and (frequently great) advice. Search the archives before posting new questions–the guys that hang out here hate duplicate postings. But it’s easier to navigate than the R help archives.