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R is one of my favorite tools and I heartily recommend it to any hacker for data visualization alone. I've used R to make sense of high-n high dimensional data
by jbr 17y ago
R is one of my favorite tools and I heartily recommend it to any hacker for data visualization alone. I've used R to make sense of high-n high dimensional data and it's a delight (even if the syntax takes a little getting used to).
As Buckwild said, best way to learn R is by messing around with it; There's in-editor help and a REPL. Download the GUI for your OS, not just the command-line tool; it has nice package management and graphical output (to a quartz window in os x).
If you're thinking of using R for plotting as well as analysis, I heartily heartily recommend the ggplot2 package. ( http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/ http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/ ) -- there's a lively google group for support and the output is far better than comparable packages (like lattice, my second favorite).
The other famous book for R isn't actually for R -- it's for S. http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS4/ http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/MASS4/ R is the open-source superset implementation of S/S-plus.
Download R and give it a shot: http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html http://cran.r-project.org/mirrors.html
- tel 17y agoI want to recommend all of Hadley Wickham's R packages, actually. Ggplot2 is one of the best R plotting packages around, easily, but --- since one of the biggest initial problems with learning R is figuring out how to use the 20-or-so built-in functions to manipulate data to the right shape --- I have to doubly-recommend Plyr and Reshape as well. I think that's the real way to learn R. Play with it until you're thoroughly frustrated, then download a few packages like Reshape and learn them. They'll probably have better documentation and typically have some really specific use cases which will help you understand how to use R toward its strengths.
- hadley 17y agoThanks!