#1

Hello Friends, I am new to R, please could you help me where to start learning? any great resource for reading?

#2

Have a look at R for Data Science.

https://r4ds.had.co.nz/

Otherwise, there is plenty of information online. 'Best' and 'easiest' will be different for different people.

4 Likes
#3

@williaml has a great suggestion, to which I'd add R Cookbook, 2nd ed., which is free to view at the link but well worth buying a hardcopy. The recipes are so arranged that by the time you try each, you'll have a good idea of much of everyday R.

Something to keep in mind.

Every R problem can be thought of with advantage as the interaction of three objects— an existing object, x , a desired object,y , and a function, f, that will return a value of y given x as an argument. In other words, school algebra— f(x) = y. Any of the objects can be composites. This means the focus should be not on how to do something initially, but what to do. Once you understand the structure of objects (like data frames) and get used to thinking of transforming one into another with functions, you'll find it easy to discover functions that do it in a single step or, usually, only a few steps.

And when it comes to anything statistical—it is extremely likely that any statistical operation that you ever run across will have one or more available functions.

4 Likes
#4

Thank you technocrat, for the book and great advise.

#5

Thank you very much Williaml for the great book.

#6

Since there was not a specific area of interest mentioned, I'll provide some general recommendations. These are what I found to work well for me.
I second @williaml post - and like to add that there is a video course available called Data Science with R.

general recommendations

For beginners - introduction to many different topics in R:
Awesome guides by RStudio

There are many books available, for free! Nearly any subject, written by wide range of specialists.
Both the recommendations mentioned above can be found here, as well as hundreds of other interesting reads.
Awesome collection of books.

Another thing I personally found extremely helpful is to follow some TidyTuesday content creators, to learn new approaches.

Conferences
Think of a use case, and there is likely a package of functions dedicated to it, with detailed documentation and enthusiastic developers supporting it. Conferences provide a great way to learn of new packages and stay up-to-date on best practices.

Some package recommendations
learnr - to gain access to interactive tutorials within RStudio IDE.
swirl - to gain a story-like introduction to many concepts at the command line.
reprex - for asking questions when you encounter hurdles

To find packages for a specific use case, consider
CRAN task views
BioConductor likely has a similar feature, but I don't know it.

personal recommendations

A mindset (in my opinion) is most important when learning R.

  1. Having a use case. Something that challenges you.
  2. Find recent material. R has been around for a while. Many blog posts, tutorials etc. are outdated.
  3. "Could this be done in R?" I found it helpful to every now and then think of tasks or concepts I encounter in day-to-day tasks and relate them to R. How would I implement them? A manual way to do this is to browse through things like Leetcode problem set, for which no definitive answer yet exists.
  4. Find how others have solved problems. Stackoverflow - RBloggers et cetera.
3 Likes
#7

This topic was automatically closed 21 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.

If you have a query related to it or one of the replies, start a new topic and refer back with a link.