Hello, R

Welcome to

R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display.

• From the R homepage:

R is

• an effective data handling and storage facility
  
• a suite of operators for calculations on arrays, in particular matrices
  
• a large, coherent, integrated collection of intermediate tools for data analysis
  
• graphical facilities for data analysis and display either on-screen or on hardcopy and
  
• a well-developed, simple and effective programming language which includes conditionals, loops, user-defined recursive functions and input and output facilities.

The term “environment” is intended to characterize it as a fully planned and coherent system, rather than an incremental accretion of very specific and inflexible tools, as is frequently the case with other data analysis software.

So many ways to learn R

• The manual
  
• Books – My favorite is The Art of R Programming by Norman Matloff
  
• Also R for Data Science (Grolemund & Wickham) and A Modern Dive into Data with R (Ismay)
• Online courses/tutorials – R for Cats, lynda.com
  
• Learn R in R with the swiRl package
  
• In this course!

Beyond base

You seem to be falling prey to a common misconception that “R” is some monolithic tool, when in fact it is a herd of cats.
– Jeff Newmiller (in response to a user who did not look for packages) R-help (December 2013)

• R has packages that are easy to install and call upon

Anyone is allowed to make an R package

• There are 7,801 R packages available on CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network)
  
• Whatever you are doing, some one has probably made an R package that can help you
  
• Packages from CRAN are very well-documented, although sometimes it is tough to get through the jargon
  
• It is often useful to use two forms of documentation

Some examples

• nlme (more stats)
• agricolae (stats for agronomy)
  
• soilR (soil carbon modeling)
  
• meteo (spatial modeling)
  
• apsimR (run another program from R)
  
• tidyr
  
• knitr
  Many packages are not on CRAN – e.g. metagenomeSeq

Whenever you think something can’t be done in R, a new package seems to come out.

R can probaby do anything, but it doesn’t mean it’s always the best (or fastest) at everything.

Follow the R community

• Twitter, even if you join for this reason #rstats
  
• R weekly
  
• R Bloggers
  
• UseR Conference if you really get into it

Find R users in your own discipline, at your own conferences

• Sometimes there are R meetings before the conference begins
  
• Keep an eye out for figures made in ggplot2, read poster methods sections

Search and ask a lot of questions

• Google
  
• Stackoverflow
  
• R-Help is also out there, but I don’t use it
  
• Talk to people face-to-face, more than just one person
  
• Join/start an R group

The remainder of the semester will be learning how to do things in R

• Basics
  
• Data wrangling
  
• Data visualization
  
• Scraping data from the web
  
• Let us know of specific needs/interests