title: Getting started in R
subtitle: Where to start

In this guide I’ll show you where to find more information / help about R, packages, and RStudio. I will mostly link to excellent tutorials.

What if I already learned R before? karl broman has a page for you

Many people fall into the trap of ‘thinking that they need to learn R’. You don’t have to learn R. You want to solve problems with R. You will never learn R, it is an entire programming language and you will be surprised all the time. That is good! It means you are learning. Don’t give up, don’t hesitate to ask questions and try to find something that you are really passionate about. Use the passion and curiosity to learn new things. I didn’t set out to learn about the magick package, I wanted to add dancing banana’s to a gif. Enjoy!

installing and basic help

R is the language (see links below) RStudio is an graphical user interface and editor that works incredibly well with R.

There is a useful page by the r-project about getting help here

• frequently asked questions

• The R project can be found here

How to install R

how to install RStudio

how to install a package

how to install a package from github, gitlab etc

where to find a community of R users or useRs

• A very friendly and open place to ask questions is the rstudio community website
• Many people blog about R on their personal blogs, many of those blogs are aggregated into r-bloggers.com run tirelessly by Tal Galili.
• A new and exciting aggregator is rweekly

online learning

• There are many online MOOCs about learning R, personally I took the Coursera course R-programming provided by John Hopkins and thought it was pretty good.

• I’ve heard many great things from Datacamp

• tidy tuesday is very cool, everyone get’s the same dataset and tries to visualise it and share it on twitter #tidytuesday , the github repo is here

• speaking about twitter, there is a growing community of useRs on twitter who regularly tweet with #rstats

installing packages

• The Comprehensive R archive Network maintains packages and builds them every week to check for problems.
• a subset of packages, recommended for beginners to advanced R users is tidyverse These packages have the same architecture and way of working.
• Many people in the biology world use bioconductor to install packages.

Conferences and meetups

• an up to date list of all the conferences and meetups in the world

• A data science list by the same authors

• rladies R-Ladies is a worldwide organization whose mission is to promote Gender Diversity in the R community.