Learning R

Updated often. If you’re an enrolled students and would like to contribute content here, please open a thread on Piazza under “Misc” and say you’d like to share a useful link.

1 Getting help with R

START HERE, with fbriatte.org, where you can learn how to find answers to your burning R questions online.

• Getting help with R
• Stack overflow: topics are tagged, and “r” is a very popular tag on the site. To go directly to R-related topics, visit http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r.
• Rstudio Community
• Reddit: r/rstats, r/Rlanguage, r/rprogramming, r/RStudio
• Github: github is a must for anyone in datascience and has many functions. For your purposes, searching for a particular package and looking into their “issues” page can be very helpful. E.g., here is the issues page for the rmarkdown package.

2 Free Online Books

• “R Graphic Cookbook”

• “R Markdown Cookbook”

• “Introduction to Data Science: Data Wrangling and Visualization with R”, by Refael Irizarry

• “Introduction to Data Science: Statistics and Prediction Algorithms Through Case Studies”, by Refael Irizarry

• “R for Data Science”, by Hadley Wickham & Garrett Grolemund

• “YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R”, by Nathaniel Phillips

• “An introduction to Biostatistics using R”, by Glover & Mitchell

• “Introductory Biostatistics with R”, by Dylan Childs, Bethan Hindle & Philip Warren

• “Applied Biostats”, by Yaniv Brandvain.

• “ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (3e)”

3 Videos

• Code Like a Pro
• Intro to Rstudio and Rstudio Cloud
• Overview of R markdown
• Rmarkdown with Rstudio
• This youtube playlist - I curated this and it contains both R info and biostatistics in general.

4 Tutorials & Simulations

• r-statistics.co, by Selva Prabhakaran - includes very good section on ggplot!

• From your textbook

• Quick-R

• Rstudio Education

• Posit Cloud Recipes

5 Freely Available (Biological) Datasets

I will keep adding stuff here, but here are some good places to search.

• Dryad - lots of scientific papers make their datasets available here.
• Zenodo - lots of scientific papers make their datasets available here.
• National Library of Medicine Dataset Catalog - great resource from the NIH, points to datasets elsewher elike zenodo, dryad, figshare, etc.
• re3data
• FigShare - lots of scientific papers make their datasets available here.
• Wold Population Review - not focused on biology but very cool nevertheless. There are subsections that have biological datasets though like the one focusing on health, for example.