
Impatient R - Tomte
http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/tutorials/impatient-r/
======
danso
One thing I'd add to the section on "Coming from another language" [0] is a
brief introduction to non-standard-evaluation. Hadley Wickham's Advanced R
(free to read on the Web) has a nice section on it:

[http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Computing-on-the-
language.html](http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Computing-on-the-language.html)

NSE is what allows these two statements to both work:

    
    
        library('ggplot2')
    

and:

    
    
        library(ggplot2)
    

It's a relatively minor thing but it helps to explain some of the "magic"
(Wickham's chapter opens with an example of how `plot()` magically knows what
to label the axes) of R and might explain some of the baffling inconsistencies
you might find in code out in the wild.

[0] [http://www.burns-
stat.com/documents/tutorials/impatient-r/r-...](http://www.burns-
stat.com/documents/tutorials/impatient-r/r-coming-programming-languages/)

~~~
emmelaich
That's a nice feature. Some languages are very prickly and have uninformative
messages when you try the equivalent of one of these.

Python has a similar-ish feature for help():

    
    
        >>> import os
        >>> help(os)
        >>> help('os')

------
huac
Same guy who wrote "The R Inferno," which is a good resource for more advanced
R users: [http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-
inferno/](http://www.burns-stat.com/documents/books/the-r-inferno/)

(this could use a 2013 in the title, however)

------
stared
Why does anything called "impatient" start with anything else but direct code
examples? (Cf. [http://blog.echen.me/2012/01/17/quick-introduction-to-
ggplot...](http://blog.echen.me/2012/01/17/quick-introduction-to-ggplot2/) or
[https://www.meteor.com/tutorials](https://www.meteor.com/tutorials))

I am impatient and I prefer starting form direct minimalistic code samples
(rather than, say, variable types). When I child starts learning LEGO blocks,
its rarely from the abstract rules - but from minimalistic example. And I have
a strong feeling that the current educational approach mistakes a reference
for an introduction.

------
melling
Here are some other resources if you want to learn R:

[https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/r.o...](https://github.com/melling/ComputerLanguages/blob/master/r.org)

------
partycoder
If you want to have the chance to learn R, and do some exercises, try
datacamp.com I am not affiliated to it, I just recommend it as a user.

