/asking_coding_questions_well

Workshop for the Simon Fraser University Research Commons on how to ask good R questions in online forums

Primary LanguageR

You need help with your R code? No problem: ask online!

… (but make sure you know how to ask)

Description

In order to have a positive experience in the active R online community and get answers to your questions, there are a number of things you absolutely have to know.

In this workshop, we will cover:

  • the various sites, their functioning, and their culture
  • how to properly ask for help
  • what not to do
  • how to make a reproducible example from your data
  • how to use the tidyverse package “reprex”
  • how to turn a sample of your data into a format that can be shared
  • how to use R datasets to illustrate your problem
  • how to create a toy example from scratch
  • how to anonymise your data
  • how to properly format your questions

Target audience

This workshop is open to current SFU students, staff, and faculty of all levels and will benefit anyone feeling a little confused in the R world or unsure where to find good R resources, how to ask for help with a reproducible example, and what to do when stuck.

Requirements

Participants need to bring a laptop with: the latest R release1 and the latest CRAN version of the package “tidyverse”2.

1 Download R from https://cran.r-project.org/ and install it on your machine

2 Install the tidyverse package by running install.packages(“tidyverse”) in R

The active development repository of this workshop is available at https://github.com/prosoitos/asking_good_questions.