What Are Some Good Books, Web Resources, and Projects for Learning R

What are some good books, web resources, and projects for learning R?

This is essentially a dump of my bookmarks, and what I have on my desk.

Getting started:

1. A tutorial video on R
2. John Cook's introduction to R for programmers
3. R reference card
4. Interactive tutorial: Introduction to R

Advanced:

1. The R-Gallery
2. The R Wiki
3. Quick-R on advanced statistics

Books:

1. The R Book (Covers the basics, classical statisitical tests, basic statistical modeling (ANOVA, ANCOVA, GLM, non-linear models, etc.), advanced statistical modeling (tree models, time-series analysis, spatial statistics, survival analysis, simulation), and twiddling with the graphics output.
2. R Graphics (How to make R graphics look sharp)

How to learn R as a programming language

For starters, you might want to look at this article by John Cook. Also make sure that you read "The R Inferno".

There are many good resources on the R homepage, but in particular, read "An Introduction to R" and "The R Language Definition".

Some very closely related stackoverflow questions:

• books-for-learning-the-r-language.
• what-are-some-good-books-web-resources-and-projects-for-learning-r
• suggestions-on-way-resources-to-start-learning-statistical-language-r

My favorite book on the subject: "Software for Data Analysis: Programming with R", by John Chambers, the creator of the S language.

Learning R. Where does one Start?

Completely biased response: learn plyr, reshape2 and ggplot2. They will cover 90% of your data manipulation and visualisation needs. All three packages have a consistent philosophy of data (which the ggplot2 book touches upon), and are designed to be consistent and easier to
learn.

Rather than learning many specialised functions, I really encourage you to learn about simple functions that can be flexibly composed to solve a wide range of problems. This is what plyr strives to do for data manipulation, and what ggplot2 strives to do for visualisation. It does mean you need to invest more time up front to learn a little about the underlying theory, but it's my belief that it will pay off handsomely in the long run.

C for R programmers - recommended resources/approaches once past the basics

I have struggled with this issue as well.

If the issue is to improve command of C, there are plenty of book lists on the subject. They all start with K&R. I enjoyed "Expert C Programming" by P. van der Linden and "C primer" by S. Prata. Any reference on the C standard library works.

If the issue is to interface C to R, other then the aforementioned official R document, you can check out this Harvard course, and this quick start guide. I have only passed scalar and arrays to C, and honestly wouldn't know how to interface complex data structures.

If the issue is to interface C++ to R, or build C++ skills, I can't really answer as I don't use much C++. A good starting point for me was "C++ the Core Language" (O'Reilly). Very simple, primitive, but useful for people coming from C.

How to create the best Interactive R Language Online Learning Platform from the views of R community?

It would probably be much more resource intensive and require more effort to create, but check this out: I found Code Academy to be a fun way to tinker with JavaScript. Unfortunately the site is (so far) only for a single language and a closed-source, venture-backed startup.

The main problem is that Rweb (as I am learning right now) does execute everything in batch, so this interpreted line-by-line approach used in CA probably cannot be done with it. If you were to create a similar app to CA for R, you'd have to open an R session for every user, hence the resource intensiveness disadvantage stated above. Hope this can be overcome, maybe someone will have an idea.

Hope you find this useful, at least as an inspiration for your endeavors. I wish you the best of luck.

define $ right parameter with a variable in R

Use [[ instead of $. x$y is short hand for x[["y"]].

my_helper <- function (my_param) {
  levels(diamond[[my_param]])
}
my_helper("cut")

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