Basic R resources

During a recent discussion with fellow SWMP techs (and some RCs), we came up with some good resources that can be used to help teach yourself the basics of R.

• Quick-R has good tutorials on a variety of topics.
• Stack Overflow is a forum that has answers to pretty much any question you can imagine.
• SWIRL is an interactive tutorial that’s run in R.
• Todd’s presentation at the 2015 Annual NERRS Meeting has a lot of good basic vocabulary and workflow info. You can download the morning’s workshop materials here .
• The SWMPr cookbook also has good basic info in it, including topics like what to do every time you start an R session.
• Coursera has several free courses; one that was recommended by a tech is called “ The Data Scientist’s Toolbox ”.
• If you like books, “Getting Started with R: An Introduction for Biologists” by Andrew P. Beckerman and Owen L. Petchey is a good one. It’s about $40 from Amazon.

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Do you have any resources that have helped you out? Let us know!

Thank you Kim! These are all great resources and I'll have to order that book (I'm a sticky note and highlighter kind of person!).

Stack Overflow has been a life saver for me!
-Kari

I just discovered this list of resources and maaay have spent a little too much time clicking on links this morning:
R Language Tips and Tricks

Also, here's a style guide from Hadley Wickham, author of such R packages as ggplot2 and dplyr:
Style Guide

Here are some more resources I found today:

R for Fledglings - free online book (essentially) aimed at ecologists. They don't overwhelm you with everything, but walk you through some exercises and teach you tips as you need them.

R documentation - if you need a function to help with something, this will search all packages in multiple places - CRAN, Bioconductor, and GitHub. (confession: I learned about this site from 'R for Fledglings'. I had a much easier time finding out how I can do a Seasonal Kendall Trend test via this search engine than through google alone.)

Here is another FANTASTIC resource I found recently - it's about certain packages (the "tidyverse", which includes things like ggplot2 and dplyr) that provide easy functions for a lot of things we do in the process of cleaning up data, reformatting it, reshaping it, etc. The book is free online (linked in the title), and it's been so useful that I ordered a hard copy because I wanted to throw money at the authors. It's worth every penny, and even better because you don't have to spend anything if you don't want to. Check it out:

R for Data Science by Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham

I second that plug from Kim, I use packages in the tidyverse literally every day. And to reiterate, the book is free online!