Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Triveni Hiremath on January 6, 2011 at 4:25am

hi,

 i am a new learner of R, i am very new to this.. i have downloaded latest version from CRAN website....i got the online manual and other help.. but not not sure about where to start from...please anyone advice me, how to learn the coding.

Do i need to learn S language before starting work on R?

How to import data from txt, sas or other datasets ?

 

Thanks in Advance for ur help  

Permalink Reply by Larry on January 6, 2011 at 7:15am

You do not need to learn S.  R is essentially a derivative work of S.

 

Some suggestions on getting started with R is to follow some online tutorials that uses sample code snippets.

http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/jfox/Courses/UCLA/index.html

http://wiki.math.yorku.ca/index.php/R:_Getting_started

http://zoonek2.free.fr/UNIX/48_R/all.html

This will get you acquainted with the R format and programming domain.  The idea is that you get familiar with the nuances of R.

 

Open up the console and follow along with some of those scripts.  Once you get familiar with some of the basic usage and functions of R I suggest getting an R Reference Card.  My favorite is Tom Short's Reference Card

http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Short-refcard.pdf

 

Then I would suggest finding out specifics about R that you want to use it for.  Use the handy R meta-search site Rseek to search for topics related to R.

http://www.rseek.org/

Here you can find many statistical and optimization topics related to R.  Look over the Task Views to see which packages in R that may be suited for your needs.

 

Lastly I recommend getting involved in the R online community.  R-bloggers.com is an excellent site that aggregates a bunch of people that blog about R.  It is a wealth of information about R topics and usage.

Permalink Reply by Gene Leynes on January 6, 2011 at 11:04am

 

I agree with Larry, and he posted some things that were new to me.

 

My list:

QuickR: (free)

  http://www.statmethods.net/index.html

IcebreakR: (free)

   http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Robinson-icebreaker.pdf

Tom Short's Reference Card: (free)

   http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Short-refcard.pdf

R In a Nutshell:

   http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596801717

 

Also anything authored by John Fox.

 

When you have a question search the R help archive. 

  http://r-project.markmail.org/

If you can't find the answer, try this: Write the question out, and create an example.  In that process I usually find a better way to search for the answer, or find the answer.  If you don't find an answer, then it's time to post the question to the group.

 

When you're frustrated by the R Gui in a few months, then explore the Eclipse plug in.

Permalink Reply by Larry on March 9, 2011 at 7:00am

I highly recommend the QuickR statmethods.net link.  That is a great tutorial.  I used that a lot when learning R.

Permalink Reply by Mary Ellen Gordon on January 6, 2011 at 11:40am

statistics.com also offers various R courses.

Permalink Reply by Triveni Hiremath on March 9, 2011 at 2:41am

hi Mary, hope you are doing great.

my R is nt reading excel files, shows package does not exist, which is the package i need to use in order to read and edit data from excel files .

 

please guide on this

Permalink Reply by Triveni Hiremath on January 7, 2011 at 5:16am

Thank you every one for yor advice and help, i will surely explore these links and learn R ;-)

Permalink Reply by Larry on March 9, 2011 at 7:10am

Jeromy Anglin's blog has a great compilation of R learning links.  Some with videos.

 

http://jeromyanglim.blogspot.com/2009/06/learning-r-for-researchers...

 

http://jeromyanglim.blogspot.com/2010/05/videos-on-data-analysis-wi...

Permalink Reply by Triveni Hiremath on March 11, 2011 at 1:06am

thank you Larry,

 

i installed additional packages after downloading zip folders to my library.

to read excel file, i converted it to csv and then used usual read.csv() code.  

details on Installing packages

To install packages you have (at least) two options. Both assume you are already running R and that your computer is connected to the internet. The first option is through the Packages item of the main menu. Choosing "Install package(s) from CRAN" will pop up a list of websites that host R software. Choose the "Canada (BC)" and click "OK" to download from an SFU mirror of the R project. You will then see a list of packages pop up -- choose the one(s) you want. Alternatively, you can install packages from the command-line. For example, to install the Rcmdr package (read "R Commander"):

> install.packages("Rcmdr",dependencies=TRUE) 

where dependencies=TRUE ensures that any packages that Rcmdr depends on are also installed.

To use a package you have installed, either use the Packages-->Load package menu item or type library(pkgname), where pkgname is the name of the package.

 

http://www.stat.sfu.ca/~mcneney/R/