Resources for Learning R
Free tutorials to help you learn R
Image from How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by John Muir and Gregg Tosh
R is notoriously difficult, finicky and at times, needlessly challenging (note that I just said the same thing three times, but the repetition is for emphasis). R is also powerful, flexible and extraordinarily nimble. If you want to try out that great new thing, it’s probably possible to do it in R without programming it from scratch. But, I’m not doing you any favors by pretending that learning R is easy and painless. It is hard. R is a powerful programming language, and as usual, with great power, comes a lot of learning, practice and preparation to know how to use those powers.
In time, you may find you truly love solving the various logic puzzles R puts before you. Or not. Regardless, I wish you the best on your journey to learning R. This far from a comprehensive list (that’s not the point), but here are a few resources to help get you started.
Resources for the Beginner R User
- RStudio Primers
- R for Excel Users
- R for Reproducible Research
- Short Introduction to R
- YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R
- EdX short courses
Resources for the Intermediate R User
Miscellaneous very useful resources
- RStudio cheatsheets
- R Graphics Cookbook (a ggplot resource)
- Rmarkdown: the Definitive Guide
- Rweekly Blog (great place to learn about updates to the R ecosystem)
- R Studio Resources (there’s so much here!)
- RStudio YouTube Channel
- Happy Git with R
- Advanced R (book, it is rather advanced)
Julia Piaskowski
Statistician
My research interests include plant genetics, spatial statistics and how to implement open science and reproducible research practices routinely.