Tutorial:A few words for R beginners

Question

[Parham]

Hi,

As a biologist who started to learn R, I encountered a lot of problems on learning the subject. Now I don't want to go into them but I just want to suggest what I think that can save you from wasting your time and energy fooling around without getting what you expect.

1. Install R ! Of course!
2. Install R-studio, this simplifies your life. Note: R-studio should be installed after R. After this you always open R-studio not R. R is the actual program but R-studio gives it the nice interactive interface.
3. Watch this webinar on R to get familiar with basics and why it's good to have R-studio.
4. Coursera offers this very nice course in R. Get the videos from their website and of course watch them!
5. While learning from the course, practice with swirl. Swirl was the best R teacher for me. It interactively makes you work around with R.
6. Also https://www.datacamp.com/courses/introduction-to-r or generally https://www.datacamp.com is very good resource for self learners!
7. Stuar51XT is a youtube channel that has very nice comprehensive R courses. Just in their videos search for "introduction to R programming".
8. Practice and expand bioinformatics oriented R skills by "Institute for Integrative Genome Biology" manual.

If I go back to my pre-R era I would follow the above. I think its a good kick-off for those who want to learn R and start getting familiar with R's environment. I hope it helps you =)

Cheers!

[Neilfws]

I would add, as someone who started using R around 13 years ago: RStudio has been a complete game-changer. It has made the software far more accessible to more people, brought together a great combination of developers, been responsible for many useful, innovative packages and all-in-all, is just A Good Thing.

[Parham]

It was a game-changer to me also. ِDeciding shall I learn R or not, it was the R-studio that made it possible for me. =)

[Istvan Albert]

swirlstats looks like a great resource - I have not heard of it before

[Parham]

It is indeed. I guess it is introduced recently by Johns Hopkins department of biostatistics.

[Parham]

Please share what you think can be useful also. I just wanted to provide a beginner/non-IT friendly workflow for people like me who can easily become lost in the labyrinths of tutorials and manuals.

[Juliana]

Dear Parham, thank you so much!! =)

[Parham]

You're welcome! I hope it helped!

[ishanee.india]

Another valuable source is MarinStatsLectures on youtube by Mike Marin. I took a start from here. Check this one too!

[zizigolu]

I noticed www.codeschool.com is also useful and easy to get although I didn't try myself yet

Answer 1

[Alex Reynolds]

R is a bit of a memory hog. Naive approaches can waste a lot of valuable time reallocating memory to data containers. I learned some approaches that try to minimize this pain in Patrick Burns' The R Inferno. Tasks that would take an hour were reduced down to five minute runs. Reading the first few chapters of this PDF will pay dividends, if your time is valuable to you.

[Steve Lianoglou]

Bonus points: you're likely to get a decent chuckle from his writing on a few occasions ...

Answer 2

[Istvan Albert]

I also like the course named One Page R: Hands-On Data Science with R

[Parham]

There are a lot of blank pages in those PDFs. Do you know the reason?!

http://handsondatascience.com/BasicRO.pdf

[Istvan Albert]

Check with the author - must be some sort of formatting problem where the font was missing

Answer 3

[Ram]

I just stumbled upon this resource today: http://rstatistics.net/

I avoid R as much as possible (I'm not proud of it) largely owing to the unintuitive syntax, but I have a feeling it's a skillset that'll help me someday.

Answer 4

[hed.robin]

Russian-speaking R beginners should definitely take R courses on stepik.org, they are good and some tasks are difficult and that's good for your brain

Answer 5

[Deepak Tanwar]

I think that R manuals would be most useful. They are very much concise. I don't know, why it is not mentioned in any of the comments above. I find these very useful :-)

http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html

[Ram]

Manuals are the default resource that people will always have a pointer to. People have been sharing resources of their personal choice here - that's why you don't see the manuals mentioned.

[Deepak Tanwar]

Thank you @Ram, for the answer :-)

[Ram]

You're welcome. And please don't call me (or anyone that's not been knighted) "sir" :)

[Deepak Tanwar]

Alright! I edited my comment. :)