I 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 som

I 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