Getting Help with R

  • Use the search box in the Help tab of RStudio.

  • Use the R functions: ?, help, apropos. Use help to find what apropos does.

  • Rdocumentation.org searches the documentation of all R packages on CRAN and more

  • Google has gotten better with R searches, but R (like other one-letter language names) is a particularly unfriendly search term. Use rseek.org intead; it is a specialized search restricted to sites already known to be related to R the statistical programming language

  • The Cookbook for R and Quick-R are organized by task and thus may be easier to find what you are looking for.

  • Do you want to know what packages exist for a given topic? CRAN Task Views provide subject matter groupings of R packages. E.g. Environmetrics and Social Sciences

  • Want to find out what datasets are included in the R packages that you have installed? data()

  • Stack Overflow is a question and answer website for computer programming questions. Search for questions about R using the “r” tag. You can do this by adding [r] to your search query. Other tags that may be useful are [ggplot2], [plyr]. However, generally you shouldn’t need to ask questions for this course. Someone has likely already asked your question before

  • If you have a question about “statistics” rather than “R”, then Cross Validated is a Q-and-A site like Stack Overflow, but for statistics and machine learning.

  • How to write a minimal repdroducible example http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example

  • If you are going to ask for help, it is important to know how to ask for help

    • Coding Killed the Cat “How to ask programming question” https://codingkilledthecat.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/how-to-ask-for-programming-help/
    • Matt Gemmell, “What Have You Tried?” http://mattgemmell.com/what-have-you-tried/

  • Other people giving advice on how to get help with R (keeping it meta):

    • http://www.rstudio.com/resources/training/online-learning/
    • https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/200552336-Getting-Help-with-R
    • http://www.quora.com/How-do-I-learn-R
    • http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/r/