If you are just getting started in R, checkout my post on good references for beginners.  Hadly Wickham has come out with yet another R package that is destined to improve my workflow and let me concentrate less on getting R to do things, and more on my research questions. ... [Read more...]

One of the most common ways people write for() loops is to create an empty results vector and then concatenate each result with the previous (and growing) results vector, like the following.  (Note: wrapping an expression in the function... [Read more...]

It is extremely common to have a dataframe containing a bunch of variables, and to do the exact same thing to all of these variables. For instance, lets say we have a dataframe that has a bunch of limb bone measurements of different animals, and we wan... [Read more...]

Rstudio provides you with tools to make your work more productive.New to R? -  check out these resources for getting staRted. RStudio is an awesome tool that can help you do your work better and faster.  In technical terms... [Read more...]

As a PhD student and researcher, I often hear friends and colleagues say that they want to learn R, but that the learning curve is so steep that they can't seem to get started.  It's true that learning any tool as powerful as R can be confusing at... [Read more...]

R for Dummies is here!  Initial reviews are very positive for this book (I haven't gotten it yet).  I am very hopeful though, because the word on the street is that it doesn't assume you have any programming knowledge or much statistical know... [Read more...]

Here is a little code snippet that shows how to do two things Use the Google Maps API to resolve place names into lat-long coordinate pairs. Plot R dataframes that contain lat-long data (for example from #1) onto Google Maps for quick visualization using the googleVis package.  The embedded map looks ... [Read more...]

The sendmailR package makes it easy to send emails with attachments from the R command line.  #load packagelibrary("sendmailR")#use string formatting and your system info to format FROM address from [Read more...]

[This article was first published on W. Andrew Barr's Paleoecology Blog, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here) [Read more...]

JGR LogoThis post introduces how to use the Java Gui for R (JGR, pronounced Jaguar) along with the Deducer package (manual here) to get a fairly full featured graphical user interface for R.InstallationNote: Be sure you are logged into an account with ... [Read more...]

I consider ggplot2 to be nothing short of a revolution in R graphics. I simply haven't found anything like this package for quickly and elegantly producing usable graphics.  I covered the quick and dirty basics of ggplot2 in a previous post. Now I... [Read more...]

This is a very basic introduction to the ggplot2 package.  A much more detailed description of the package can be found in this book ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. On his website (http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/) package author Hadley Wickham describes ggplot2 asa plotting system for R, based ... [Read more...]

JGR is a pretty nice Java based GUI for R.  The primary reason I like this is that it is truly cross platform, and will work the same for any operating systemAdded benefits are that some packages like rJava and others tend to break on Mac OSX, but... [Read more...]

In order to do something to a bunch of files at once, we first need a vector which contains the file paths of just the files we are interested in. startingDir [Read more...]

Sometimes you just need a graphical messagebox....know what I mean? If only because it pops up in front of all the other open windows and alerts you to the fact that your R script is waiting for you to do something, or is finished doing something el... [Read more...]