

R for Programmers - voberoi
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/r.html

======
hadley
There are a few minor errors:

* the explanation of 8.6 is wrong - it's cbind that's coercing all columns to a common type, not data.frame

* 8.7 is a bad example of good R code - use column names not indices!

* in 9 (and elsewhere) it's not necessary to continually strips names off vectors or use return in functions

* 11.2.1 to count TRUEs in logical vector, sum it.

...

~~~
albertcardona
Please could you forward these comments to the author? Considering he is
offering the pdf for free, he may take errata as well. Thanks!

~~~
hadley
Good suggestion. Done.

------
carbocation
I write PHP and some perl, and recently learned R. This guide would have been
useful to me at the beginning. What it does well is that it jumps right into
concepts that programmers will naturally wonder about and already conceptually
grok. It wastes no time on explaining basic programming concepts, nor does it
dig deep into esoteric R-isms. It helps you translate your
PHP/Perl/Java/whatever mindset into the R language. An extremely useful
introductory document.

------
arvinjoar
My mother has a PhD in Cognitive Linguistics and is working at UCSC. She is
using R, she hasn't programmed before, so I wonder how well she is doing with
R. Well, I will meet her again around Christmas, maybe I could help her out a
bit with R, I'm sure there's saomething she has missed, since she's a non-
programmer.

~~~
revorad
What kind of functionalities is she using? I'm working on some articles and an
app to help people learn R, especially people who are scared of programming or
don't like it. I'm interested in learning what problems R beginners in
different fields face. Feel free to drop me a line (see email in profile).

~~~
arvinjoar
I'm talking with her on Skype atm, she's telling me that she hasn't starting
using it yet, but that she went to a course at UCSB held by Stefan Th. Gires
about R.

She is going to start using it in January when she gets some new corpus
material.

She also said that they are going to use Tinn-R.

~~~
revorad
Sounds good. Tinn-R is a popular editor for R, although I prefer emacs+ess.
Good luck to your mum!

------
ramanujan
Google's R Style Guide may be helpful:

[http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/google-
r-s...](http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/google-r-style.html)

------
voberoi
... a super handy dandy resource for programmers new to R.

------
jhammerb
most of my issues with r can be traced back to the nonintuitive (for me) data
structures. i found <http://www.amazon.com/Data-Manipulation-R-
Use/dp/0387747303> to be the most concise guide for how to manipulate common
data structures.

------
amoeba
This PDF has been the most helpful reference for me while learning R this last
year.

------
mhd
"...who want to do statistics", right? Are there any good use cases for R for
other stuff? (Or some interesting ways you used statistics as a "working
programmer" recently?)

~~~
ugh
It's an introduction for those already familiar with some of the concepts that
have to be extensivly explained in introductions for, say, social scientists.

I have to add, though, that I (as a non-programmer and aspiring social
scientist) liked this tutorial much better than many other R tutorials out
there. In know a little bit about programming but that was enough to pretty
much understand the whole tutorial. (I have the sneaking suspicion that I'm an
outlier so don't expect many other social scientists to know about basic CS
concepts.)

(And boy am I happy that I now can feel confident ditching SPSS in favor of R.
That gruesome SPSS!)

------
jonathansizz
How long does it take to learn R compared to (for example) Perl?

~~~
revorad
I don't know about Perl, but if you want to get up and running with R for some
basic data analysis, I'd say:

1 week to get used to the syntax and do basic data manipulation such as
contructing, editing data frames, reading and writing files etc. You can also
get going with the simple graphing functions quite quickly.

1 week to learn the statistical stuff - scatter plotting, correlations, linear
regression modelling. Of course, I'm talking about just learning the basic
syntax. Doing regression properly could take a long time to learn.

The R Book by Crawley is quite a good introduction, especially if you want to
brush up on some basic statistics. It's not very in-depth though, so you might
have to move on to more advanced texts after a month or so.

------
the_real_r2d2
This is a good resource to start. Then it might be better resources (there are
some other tutorials around) but as a beginner in R I found it very good.

------
graywh
-1 for not mentioning mapply, tapply, or sapply.

------
herdrick
Is there something like this for MATLAB?

