General help

Online help

I have been programming in R for years and still find myself Googling how to do basic things that I’ve forgotten about. Other times, I encounter new coding problems where I can’t quite come up with a good solution.

Fortunately there are tons of online resources to help you. The most important is StackOverflow (a Q&A site with hundreds of thousands of answers to all sorts of programming questions). I will point to others as the semester advances.

Helpers and Templates

• RMarkdown Cheatsheet An overview of Markdown and RMarkdown conventions.
• RStudio Cheatsheets Other quick guides, including a more comprehensive RMarkdown reference and a information about using RStudio’s IDE, and some of the main tools in R.

Guides

• R Style Guide. Write readable code.
• Jenny Bryan’s Stat 545. Notes and tutorials for a Data Analysis course taught by Jennifer Bryan at the University of British Columbia. Lots of useful material.
• knitr demos Documentation and examples for knitr by its author, Yihui Xie. There is also a knitr book covering the same ground in more detail.
• Rmarkdown documentation from the makers of RStudio. Lots of good examples.
• Plain Person’s Guide The git repository for this project.
• Karl Broman’s Tutorials and Guides Accurate and concise guides to many of the tools and topics described here, including getting started with reproducible research, using git and GitHub, and working with knitr.
• Makefiles for OCR and converting Shapefiles. Some further examples of Makefiles in the data-analysis pipeline, by Lincoln Mullen