R Resources

R is a data analysis and statistical programming environment. Although R is extremely powerful, and the price is certainly right, R is a bit hard to learn. These links should help:

There are several targeted search engines that make it much easier to find something R-related.

John Cook's R programming for those coming from other languages, especially the sections on vectors and matrices.

Tom Moertel's blog post on R's function call semantics. R has lazy argument evaluation, and an interesting way of combining passed arguments with default arguments. This allows for really tight code, but is unusual.

David Hiebler's MATLAB/R reference provides a roadmap for people familiar with one of the two apps who are trying to learn the other.

Figures (with source code!) from Lattice: Multivariate Data Visualization With R by Deepayan Sarkar.

The R Journal (formerly R News) has useful articles and tutorials.

Stephen Eglen's A Quick Guide to Teaching R Programming to Computational Biology Students [PLoS Comput. Biol. Aug. 2008]. Has a section on resources for students. This is more useful if you're teaching R than if you're trying to learn it.

The special variable .Last.value contains the results of the last computation done from the command line. This can be useful if you forgot to assign the results of a long-running calculation to a variable. (In Python the underscore _ does the same thing.)