What is “R”? If you guessed, “a letter in the alphabet, d’oh!” 😀 You were right and on family feud that probably would have been the number one answer. But the letter “R” also represents a programming language typically used by people to compile statistics and analyze or create visual representations of a data set. In many ways it is similar to products like Microsoft Excel, SPSS and STATA but free to download and perhaps even more powerful.
Unfamiliar R, I turned to my colleague Jeff Hemsley an active contributor to the R community of bloggers (http://www.r-bloggers.com/?s=Jeff+Hemsley). I was confident that Jeff would be turn me to helpful resources interested in learning more about R. The list below does exactly that!
The resources listed below are an assortment of books, websites and a videos.
What is “R”?
- A short video describing the evolution of R and highlighting how and why it is used: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR2bHSJ_eck
Want to see what visualizations from “R” might look like?
- Countless number of graphics produced using R: http://rgm3.lab.nig.ac.jp/RGM/
Want to give it a try?
- Time to stop reading and start downloading and using R: http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html
- Want to make life a little easier for yourself? Try the integrated development environment for R: http://www.rstudio.com/
Don’t feel like spending hours reading? How about watching short videos?
- Head over to http://www.twotorials.com where you’ll find almost one-hundred short video’s to get you up to speed with R: http://www.twotorials.com/2012/03/what-does-object-oriented-statistical.html
Don’t have time to sit threw a bunch of videos?
- This site is designed to help you quickly employ R into the work that you do: http://www.statmethods.net/
- A 4 page R reference card maybe able to help you get started: http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Short-refcard.pdf
- A really long (but useful) tip sheet: http://pj.freefaculty.org/R/Rtips.html
Wish you knew other R users in your area?
- NYC R-Users group: http://www.meetup.com/nyhackr/
- Seattle R-Users group: http://www.meetup.com/Seattle-useR/
- Not from NYC or Seattle http://www.meetup.com/find/?keywords=R+Programming+Language&radius=Infinity&userFreeform=Seattle%2C+WA%2C+USA&sort=default
You really want “books” on programming in R?
- An Introduction to Data Science”: http://ischool.syr.edu/media/documents/2012/3/DataScienceBook1_1.pdf
- The R Inferno – Burns Statistics: http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/
Got questions? Need help?
What’s next?
If there is a resource (especially videos) that should be on this list but isn’t, either mention it in the comments section below or email me.