Some time ago, since I was able to use R by myself, have found some fellows and other people who wanted to learn R as well. Then I pointed them to help pages, to CRAN repositories… but in some cases they said that didn’t know how to start using those resources. Obviously, the main self-perceived limitation for non-programmers is the use of “commands” -ok, many of the 80′s kids will remember the use of some command lines to access games such as PacMan, Frogger… 🙂.

At the same time, they also wanted to refresh some basic statistics, acquiring a general knowledge of their data before asking for a statistician’s help. An idea to quickly help them was to make some scripts to guide them through basic commands, seeing results on real-time, and being able to recycle them for their own data.

If you have just started using R, maybe they can be useful for you. However, I will recommend that you use some open “plain text” file(s) to paste your favorite commands and clone/modify them to suit your needs. Remember to store the files where you can access them later!

• Tip: you can change the extension of your mytext.txt file into mytext.R file, telling Windows to open it with the Notepad again. It will be also a plain text document, but some text editors will recognize it as an “R script” and will highlight the content according to that.
• Apart from the Notepad in Windows, you also have a bunch of other text/code editors which are more pleasant to use. See for example R-studio and Notepad ++.

Copy the Gists below into your own text files, and begin playing with R!