Staying up with R

No, I don’t mean late night coding. R is constantly changing – both as a language and a platform. Updates containing new functionality are frequent. New and revised packages appear several times a week.  Staying current with these myriad changes can be a challenge.

In this post, I thought that I would share some of the online resources that I have found to be most useful for keeping current with what is happening in world of R.

Of course the R project homepage (www.r-project.org) and the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN; cran.r-project.org) are  your first stops for all things R.

CRANberries (dirk.eddelbuettel.com/cranberries/) is a site that aggregates information about new and updated packages, and contains links to CRAN for each.

Planet R (planetr.stderr.org) is a great site aggregor, and includes information from a wide range of sources (including CRANberries). This is my first stop for staying up on new packages.

R Bloggers (www.r-bloggers.com)  is a central hub (blog aggregator) for collecting content from bloggers writing about R. It contains several new articles each day and I am addicted to it. It is a great place to learn new analytic and programming techniques.

The R Journal (journal.r-project.org) is a freely accessible refereed journal containing articles on the R project and contributed packages. This is a great way to gain deeper insight into what specific packages can do.

The Journal of Statistical Software (www.jstatsoft.org) is also a freely accessbile refereed journal and contains articles, book reviews, and code snippets on statistical computing topics. There are frequent articles about R.

Finally, R-Help, the main R mailing list (stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help), is the best place to ask questions about R. Be sure to read the FAQ before posting or you may get flamed by veteran programmers. The archives are searchable and contain a wealth of information.

These are my favorites – the ones I go back to again and again. What are yours?