beginner tips

Hadley Wickham’s ggplot2 basics

August 1, 2012 | David Smith

If you haven't made the plunge yet to making R graphics with Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 package, his "ggplot2 basics" slides (from the recent Introduction to Data Visualization and Analysis course at JSM) is a good place to start. Once you get the hang of the "grammar of graphics" notation, you'll ... [Read more...]

20 free R tutorials (and one reference card)

April 25, 2012 | David Smith

If you're just getting started with the R language, R user Pairach Piboonrungroj has published a handly list of 20 free R tutorials published by university departments. Included on the list: Getting Started with the R Data Analysis Package (by Norm Matloff), Getting Started with R (from York University), and An ... [Read more...]

Two-minute tutorials for R beginners

March 9, 2012 | David Smith

R user Anthony Damico has created "Twotorials": a series of two-minute tutorials for newcomers to R. Topics include how to download and install R, how to do simple arithmetic in r, how to work with data tables in r and many others. The tutorials are especially useful for users of ... [Read more...]

‘S Poetry’ and ‘The R Inferno’: Hardcopies on Sale

January 12, 2012 | David Smith

Patrick Burns' informative and entertaining books for R programmers, 'S Poetry' and 'The R Inferno', which have long been available as free downloads, are now available in an attractive hardcover format from Lulu Press and are on 25% sale through the end of January (use discount code LULUBOOKUK305). 'S Poetry', although ... [Read more...]

How to speed up loops in R

November 28, 2011 | David Smith

As with any language, there are often several ways to code up the solution to a programming problem in R. If performance of the code is important (i.e. it's something you plan to run many times, or with a lot of data), how you code the solution can often ... [Read more...]

Three free books on R for Statistics

November 8, 2011 | David Smith

Avril Coghlan, a lecturer at University College Cork in Ireland, has written and made available for free three books ideal for students or practitioners new to R who want to use it for multivariate analysis, time series analysis or biomedical statistics. Each book begins with practical advice for installing and ... [Read more...]

A brief introduction to R for SAS and SPSS users

September 29, 2011 | David Smith

If you've used SAS or SPSS and want a jump-start into the basics of the popular R language, next week's webinar, Introduction to R for SAS and SPSS Users will be of interest to you. While R, SAS and SPSS are all three software systems for data analysis and graphics, ... [Read more...]

R in the Bioinformatics Knowledgeblog

June 21, 2011 | David Smith

The Knowledge Blog progect is a new, light-weight way of publishing scientific, academic and technical knowledge on the web, across several scientific disciplines. One such discipline is bioinformatics, and the Bioinformatics Knowledgeblog contains useful scientific reference material for bioinformatics, including several resources for R users. There you'll find an R ... [Read more...]

Get Daily R tips on Twitter

May 16, 2011 | David Smith

John D Cook, editor of the always-interesting and eclectic blog The Endeavour, has been posting facts about Statistics and distribution theory to the StatFact Twitter account on a daily basis for over a year now. He also curates a number of other daily tip services and the newest one — RLangTip — ... [Read more...]

An essential vocabulary for the R language

May 11, 2011 | David Smith

The Oxford English Dictionary includes more than 600,000 words, yet most of us get by in our day-to-day lives with a vocabulary of just a few thousand. In a similar vein, the R language includes thousands of functions: when you start up R 2.13, you have 2832 functions at your disposal: __ length(apropos(".", ... [Read more...]

How to learn R

May 3, 2011 | David Smith

Over at R community site inside-R.org, Revolution's Joseph Rickert has published a How-To guide with tips for new users on How to Learn R, with links to resources for R books, blogs and courses. Check it out at the link below. Inside-R: How to Learn R [Read more...]

Review of the R Cookbook

May 2, 2011 | David Smith

While we were at R/Finance in Chicago over the weekend (more on that later), it was a great pleasure to meet in person Paul Teetor, author of the R Cookbook (published by O'Reilly). If you haven't picked it up yet, I recommend checking it out: if you already have ... [Read more...]

Learning R through baseball: sab-R-metrics

January 21, 2011 | David Smith

The words "statistics" and "baseball" are often found near each other, but there's a lot more to statistics than dividing the number of hits by the number of swings to get a batting average. And there's a lot more to sabermetrics -- the statistical analysis of baseball -- than averages, ... [Read more...]

What is R?

June 7, 2010 | David Smith

Probably the question I get asked the most about R is, "What is R"? It's can be a hard question to answer, because R is so many things. It's data analysis software. It's an environment for data analysis. It's a language. It's an open-source project. It's a community. The Wikipedia ... [Read more...]

13 videos for learning R

May 5, 2010 | David Smith

Jeromy Anglim has just posted a nice round-up of instructional videos for learning R. The videos are categorized into four levels: What is R? Introductory R? Intermediate and Advanced Materials on R and Related Resources (including a link to written resources for getting started with R). Check out all the ... [Read more...]

Smoothing time series with R

March 29, 2010 | David Smith

Smoothing is a statistical technique that helps you to spot trends in noisy data, and especially to compare trends between two or more fluctuating time series. It's a useful visualization tool that I'm pleased to see cropping up more and more in statistical graphics on the Web -- it's now ... [Read more...]
1 2

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)