Reason 10 An awesome community

  • How to engage with the R community
  • Great free learning resources

We are almost at the end of this short introduction to R. We have barely scratched the surface of what R has to offer, but I hope, this has helped you figure out whether R is for you and whether you want to learn more about it. If you do, I think the best way is to find other people to learn from.

10.1 Get involved with the community

R has an incredibly friendly, diverse, and welcoming community that is very open to beginners and loves to share knowledge, and because R is so widespread, there’s always an R nerd nearby who’s willing to help. Don’t be afraid to ask questions! Here are some ideas how you could engage with the community:

  • The Twitter hashtag #RStats is a good way keep track of all the new things in the R world and “talk shop” with other R nerds.

  • R conferences and user groups are a good place to meet other R users. Jumping rivers is maintaining a list. (https://jumpingrivers.github.io/meetingsR/index.html). If there is non in your area, why not create your own?

  • There is also a R for Data Science learning community that organizes community learning events such as Tidy Tuesday – a weekly data visualization challenge. Participate in Tidy Tuesday to sharpen your data wrangling and data visualization skills and see how other people are approaching the same data.

  • Write your own package or contribute to packages. This is an excellent way to become a better R programmer.

10.2 How to continue learning?

Another thing that is unique about the R community is that R is mainly used by (and taught to) people who are not software engineers or computer scientists. As a result there is a lot of learning material that is made for people without a technical background. Amazingly, much of it is generously made available for free and really good! I will present just a few personal recommendations. The Awesome R Learning Resources List provides a more comprehensive list of resources for learning R, and Flavio Azevedo has compiled a list of R Tutorials on YouTube. R user groups and conferences also often put their talks online. See, for example, the RStudio presentations.

An excellent book to pick up next would be R for Data Science. It provides a comprehensive overview of the Tidyverse. If you are working in education, then also check out R for Education — a handbook for teaching and learning with R and RStudio.

Finally, the Carpentries are an organisation that teaches scientific computing skills to researchers, including R courses for beginners. Many universities and research institutes offer Carpentries courses for free to their students and employees. The material is available online, e.g., R for Social Sciences and R for Ecologists.