Next steps

Learning the Language

The content in today’s workshop was intended to give you an overview of what is possible with R. The best way to learn is to tackle a problem that you’re personally interested in using R. Besides that, I recommend the R for Data Science book by Hadley Wickham and Garret Grolemund. It’s an excellent first book to learn the language and to get a good workflow for data analysis.

Visualization

One of the most powerful features of R is the ability to make publication-worthy graphics with a high-degree of customization. Here are some more resources for you to improve in this area:

• This is a good example of building up a visualization from pieces. Here, they work on reproducing a graphic from the Economist Magazine.
• Luke Tierney at the University of Iowa posted this easy-to-follow tutorial on working with the flights dataset as a timeseries.
• Tidy Tuesday is a project run by the R for Data Science team. Every Tuesday, a new, tidied data set is posted for people to practice their data visualization skills on. You can view people’s submissions by looking through the #tidytuesday hashtag on Twitter.
• David Robinson, a data scientist, posts his take on Tidy Tuesday datasets on his YouTube channel. These videos are incredibly informative and will not only teach you visualization and data analysis workflows using R, but also some statistical modeling.

Subject-focused work

• David Robinson also wrote an excellent book teaching Bayesian statistics using R. The book, called Introduction to Empirical Bayes, walks you through the very basics of Bayesian statistics and simulation up to creating sophisticated prediction models. Robinson also provides all the code in the book so you can follow along. The book is published under the name-your-own-price model, so you can download the book for free; however, it is absolutely worth the suggested price of $10.
• Numerical Ecology with R is another pretty good book.

Help

• Stack Overflow is usually the first site people check out when they’re looking for help with a programming question. Make sure to search the site first before you ask your question - chances are it’s already been answered.