R programing. R project. R project. R programing. Home Page. How best to learn R? Resources to help you learn and use R. Tutorials - How to learn R as a programming language. Learning R. When R is brought up as a possibility for doing statistics or data mining or any sort of predictive analytics among non R users, someone will invariably point out that R has a “steep learning curve”, and the response among those gathered usually includes a significant amount of head nodding.
Even those who have put in heroic efforts to help people learn R sometimes say scary things: e.g. in his introduction to Rattle, a Data Mining GUI for R, Graham Williams writes: R offers a breadth and depth in statistical computing beyond what is available in commercial closed source products. Yet R remains, primarily, a programming language for the highly skilled statistician, and out of the reach of many. (The R Journal Vol. ½, December 2009) Are things really that bad?
Resources for Getting Started with R. R, the open source statistical software environment, is powerful but can be a challenge to approach for beginners.
For me, the best way to learn R, especially on the visualization side of things, is to dive right in. Grab some data and make some charts, or better yet, find a graph you like and try to replicate it.