Fixing R Documentation

If you couldn’t tell already, we are pretty big fans of the R language here at DataCamp. From its ability to create complex statistical models with a few lines of code to its robust graphical capabilities and stunning data visualizations – R is a very handy language for any aspiring data scientist to learn. One of the main benefits of R is its robust community which provides support in the form of mailing lists, user-submitted documentation and various tutorials and helpful blogs. Across the web, you can find the answer to almost any R problem you encounter including questions about how to use specific packages and functions. The problem? This information is spread across the web on various threads, comment sections, and repositories making it hard for users to find and access this support. 

Luckily, RDocumentation.org is here to help! RDocumentation aggregates help documentation for R packages from CRAN, BioConductor, and GitHub – the three most common sources of current R documentation. RDocumentation.org goes beyond simply aggregating this information, however, by bringing all of this documentation to your fingertips via the RDocumentaion package. The RDocumentation package overwrites the basic help functions from the utils package and gives you access to RDocumentation.org from the comfort of your RStudio IDE. 

You can copy and paste the two lines of code below to install and load RDocumentation today:

# Install and load RDocumentation for comprehensive help with R packages and functions
install.packages("RDocumentation")
library("RDocumentation")

Do you have the RDocumentation package installed? Great! Let’s take a look at some of the helpful new features now available directly in your RStudio IDE. 

Search

Do you ever forget the name of a function you need to use or wonder which package you should use for a particular purpose? With Rdocumentation you can easily search through all CRAN, BioConductor, and Github packages and their archives available in R. The Rdocumentation package puts this search capability directly in your RStudio IDE so that you can find the answers you are looking for immediately. 

Discover

There are over 11,500 R packages available on CRAN, BioConductor, and Github. How many do you know about? By going to RDocumentation.org you can view the newest packages, the most popular packages, and the most active package maintainers. There is even a task view so that you can explore R packages by topics like finance, machine learning, reproducible research and more!. Are you a package maintainer? You can use RDocumentation to see how your downloads match up against other similar packages!

Community Examples 

The R community is a robust, intelligent network of individuals who are willing to answer your R questions. The RDocumention package brings this helpful community directly into your RStudio IDE. RDocumentation gives users the ability to post community examples that enhance the author’s original documentation and provide more specific use cases of certain functions. Simply enter ? followed by the function name to see the original documentation plus all of the community examples – no more searching through thousands of search results online to find the answer!