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If you already know another dynamic language and want to understand R, I would recommend skipping all the intros to R based around data analysis and start with
by qntty 5y ago
If you already know another dynamic language and want to understand R, I would recommend skipping all the intros to R based around data analysis and start with Advanced R by Hadley Wickham. It will explain all the weirdness you'll encounter right up front before it confuses you. Then you can read the data analysis tutorials and focus on the content rather than the R weirdness.
- claytonjy 5y agoIt's also available online under a creative commons license: https://adv-r.hadley.nz/ https://adv-r.hadley.nz/
- wodenokoto 5y agoI was quite surprised how easy that book was to read and understand. I’d expected “advanced” any language to be much more difficult.
- beforeolives 5y agoThe title is kind of misleading - the book is more of a list of exceptions, edge cases, unexpected behaviour and other gotchas.
- carljv 5y agoThat is not an accurate description of the book.
- CornCobs 5y agoI agree that Advanced R is a fantastic resource; however I do not think reading it is a good way to learn R. Advanced R explains the whys not the whats, and someone coming into R, who hasn't encountered any of the stuff Wickham gives intuitions for will likely find it an inexplicable truck of concepts. Instead I would propose using R in some capacity, encountering it's weird quirks (why sometimes evaluating an expression prints something to console and sometimes it doesn't? How is dplyr using my column names as variables? Why do I get warnings when using & instead of &&?) And then turning to Advanced R as a source of sanity Another source I would recommend is in fact the R language definition. It's very approachable and you quickly realize that R is pretty simple at the core, buried under piles of cruft