If you haven't made the plunge yet to making R graphics with Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 package, his "ggplot2 basics" slides (from the recent Introduction to Data Visualization and Analysis course at JSM) is a good place to start. Once you get the hang of the "grammar of graphics" notation, you'll ... [Read more...]

If you're just getting started with the R language, R user Pairach Piboonrungroj has published a handly list of 20 free R tutorials published by university departments. Included on the list: Getting Started with the R Data Analysis Package (by Norm Matloff), Getting Started with R (from York University), and An ... [Read more...]

R user Anthony Damico has created "Twotorials": a series of two-minute tutorials for newcomers to R. Topics include how to download and install R, how to do simple arithmetic in r, how to work with data tables in r and many others. The tutorials are especially useful for users of ... [Read more...]

Patrick Burns' informative and entertaining books for R programmers, 'S Poetry' and 'The R Inferno', which have long been available as free downloads, are now available in an attractive hardcover format from Lulu Press and are on 25% sale through the end of January (use discount code LULUBOOKUK305). 'S Poetry', although ... [Read more...]

By Joseph Rickert Yesterday, the cosmic randomizer placed me next to a newly minter lawyer in a crowed Los Gatos coffee shop. In three minutes of conversation I learned that that the fellow was interested in corporate law, was about to take a job that would give him a seat ... [Read more...]

As with any language, there are often several ways to code up the solution to a programming problem in R. If performance of the code is important (i.e. it's something you plan to run many times, or with a lot of data), how you code the solution can often ... [Read more...]

Avril Coghlan, a lecturer at University College Cork in Ireland, has written and made available for free three books ideal for students or practitioners new to R who want to use it for multivariate analysis, time series analysis or biomedical statistics. Each book begins with practical advice for installing and ... [Read more...]

If you missed last week's webinar from Bob Muenchen, "Introduction to R for SAS and SPSS users", you missed a great overview of the R Project and how it compares to commercial statistical software. Bob's slides are below, and you can download the slides and replay from the Revolution Analytics ... [Read more...]

If you've used SAS or SPSS and want a jump-start into the basics of the popular R language, next week's webinar, Introduction to R for SAS and SPSS Users will be of interest to you. While R, SAS and SPSS are all three software systems for data analysis and graphics, ... [Read more...]

The Knowledge Blog progect is a new, light-weight way of publishing scientific, academic and technical knowledge on the web, across several scientific disciplines. One such discipline is bioinformatics, and the Bioinformatics Knowledgeblog contains useful scientific reference material for bioinformatics, including several resources for R users. There you'll find an R ... [Read more...]

John D Cook, editor of the always-interesting and eclectic blog The Endeavour, has been posting facts about Statistics and distribution theory to the StatFact Twitter account on a daily basis for over a year now. He also curates a number of other daily tip services and the newest one — RLangTip — ... [Read more...]

The Oxford English Dictionary includes more than 600,000 words, yet most of us get by in our day-to-day lives with a vocabulary of just a few thousand. In a similar vein, the R language includes thousands of functions: when you start up R 2.13, you have 2832 functions at your disposal: __ length(apropos(".", ... [Read more...]

Over at R community site inside-R.org, Revolution's Joseph Rickert has published a How-To guide with tips for new users on How to Learn R, with links to resources for R books, blogs and courses. Check it out at the link below. Inside-R: How to Learn R [Read more...]

While we were at R/Finance in Chicago over the weekend (more on that later), it was a great pleasure to meet in person Paul Teetor, author of the R Cookbook (published by O'Reilly). If you haven't picked it up yet, I recommend checking it out: if you already have ... [Read more...]

The words "statistics" and "baseball" are often found near each other, but there's a lot more to statistics than dividing the number of hits by the number of swings to get a batting average. And there's a lot more to sabermetrics -- the statistical analysis of baseball -- than averages, ... [Read more...]

For new users, starting R for the first time can be a little daunting. Luckily, Patrick Burns of Burns Statistics has put together a handy tutorial to help the first-time R user get beyond "blank screen syndrome": So you have successfully started R on your machine. Here's where the trouble ... [Read more...]

Probably the question I get asked the most about R is, "What is R"? It's can be a hard question to answer, because R is so many things. It's data analysis software. It's an environment for data analysis. It's a language. It's an open-source project. It's a community. The Wikipedia ... [Read more...]

Jeromy Anglim has just posted a nice round-up of instructional videos for learning R. The videos are categorized into four levels: What is R? Introductory R? Intermediate and Advanced Materials on R and Related Resources (including a link to written resources for getting started with R). Check out all the ... [Read more...]

Smoothing is a statistical technique that helps you to spot trends in noisy data, and especially to compare trends between two or more fluctuating time series. It's a useful visualization tool that I'm pleased to see cropping up more and more in statistical graphics on the Web -- it's now ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham (the creator of the popular ggplot2 graphics package for R) has posted video of a 2-hour short course on Visualisation in R at his blip.tv channel. The video is split into four thirty-minute segments: Basic Graphics Displaying Large Data Data manipulation and transformations Polishing your plots for ... [Read more...]