Mark Sellors, Head of Data Engineering

I started working with R around about 5 years ago. Parts of the R world have changed substantially over that time, while other parts remain largely the same. One thing that hasn’t changed however, is that there has never been a simple, high-level text to introduce newcomers to the ecosystem. I believe this is especially important now that the ecosystem has grown so much. It’s no longer enough to just know about R itself. Those working with, or even around R, must now understand the ecosystem as a whole in order to best manage and support its use.

Hopefully the Field Guide to the R Ecosystem goes some way towards filling this gap.

The field guide aims to provide a high level introduction to the R ecosystem. Designed for those approaching the language for the first time, managers, ops staff, and anyone that just needs to get up to speed with the R ecosystem quickly.

This is not a programming guide and contains no information about the language itself, so it’s very definitely not aimed at those already developing with R. However, it is hoped that the guide will be useful to people around those R users. Whether that’s their managers, who’d just like to understand the ecosystem better, or ops staff tasked with supporting R in an enterprise, but who don’t know where to start.

Perhaps, you’re a hobbyist R user, who’d like to provide more information to your company in order to make a case for adopting R? Maybe you’re part of a support team who’ll be building out infrastructure to support R in your business, but don’t know the first thing about R. You might be a manager or executive keen to support the development of an advanced analytics capability within your organisation. In all of these cases, the field guide should be useful to you.

It’s relatively brief and no prior knowledge is assumed, beyond a general technical awareness. The topics covered include, R, packages and CRAN, IDEs, R in databases, commercial versions of R, web apps and APIs, publishing and the community.

I really hope you, or someone around you, finds the guide useful. If you have any feedback, find me on twitter and let me know. If you you’d like to propose changes to the guide itself, you’ll find instructions in the first chapter and the bookdown source on GitHub. Remember, the guide is intentionally high-level and is intended to provide an overview of the ecosystem only, rather than any deep-dive technical discussions. There are already plenty of great guides for that stuff!

I’d also like to say a huge thanks to everyone who has taken time out of their day to proof read this for me and provide invaluable feedback, suggestions and corrections. The community is undoubtedly one of R’s greatest assets.

Originally posted on Mark’s blog, here.