/startLearn.R

Tutorials and Materials for Learning R

An Introduction to R

These tutorials are designed to prepare students for the R-intensive lab assignments used in GEOSCIENCE 541: Paleobiology at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. The repository was created and is maintained by Andrew A. Zaffos.

Importantly, these tutorials focus on the core programming and computer science principles underlying the R language, and do not cover methods of data analysis (i.e., statistics). Statistical testing and other aspects of data analysis (e.g., data visualization) are instead presented throughout the course in lab assignments.

Table of Contents

How to install R

The home page for R is http://www.r-project.org. You can download the installation file by clicking on the homepage and finding the download R link.

Other R Tutorials and Resources

As with most things, there are a variety of ways to teach R - particularly to beginners. If there is any section of these tutorials that you find confusing or insufficienty detailed, the internet is rife with other resources for learning R. I encourage you to explore these if you need help completing the exercises in this repository.

Resource Description
Kelly Black A good R tutorial, but be warned that it splits its attention between R programming principles and statistics.
Steve Holland Another good R tutorial that also covers basic plotting principles, which are not covered here.
David Bapst Another good R tutorial that covers many of the same topics discussed here with some plotting aspects thrown in.
Hadley Wickham This is an excellent resource that largely focuses on the programming side of R. As its name, advanced R, implies, the tutorial is meant for more advanced users.
Stack Overflow Stack Overflow is the de facto forum for R (and other language) questions. The community is easily irritated by questions from beginners, so it behooves you to search through the forums to see if your question has already been answered.
Sublime Text Sublime Text is a text editing software. It is one of the best (free) text editors for coding in any language, including R.