R.rrrrgh

March 14, 2009 3:06 PM

Are There Good Blogs About The Statistical Programming Language, R?

I recently found the R Cookbook site and have enjoyed the R code and tips offered. I was wondering if there are other blogs out there that discuss how to use R better.

P.S. I am asking this on ask.metafilter because Googling "R" is supremely unhealthful.

posted by chrisalbon to Work & Money (11 answers total)

I know nothing about this but my boyfriend works with R and recommends the archives of the R-help mailing list available on Nabble.

His company also has a blog, which has "News about R, statistics and the world of open source from the staff of REvolution Computing" which also might be of interest to you.
posted by radiomayonnaise at 3:19 PM on March 14, 2009

There are the discussion lists and their archives. There are tons of R-howto pages, but to find many of them you kind of have to know what to look for. For example, "r nlme examples" "r lme tutorial" etc. actually comes up with tons on how to use R to fit mixed effects models. There's kickstarting R among many other books and intros.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 3:20 PM on March 14, 2009

In reponse to your postscript, RSeek.org is a customized view of Google for searching for R stuff. Very helpful in general, although I didn't find any promising blogs with it.
posted by grouse at 3:22 PM on March 14, 2009 [2 favorites]

1) yes, Rseek.org is the place to search for help.

2) Here are a few sites. Their blogrolls and links will lead you to other resources:

http://onertipaday.blogspot.com/
http://www.statmethods.net/
http://friendfeed.com/rooms/r-for-bioinformatics
http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/thumbs.php?sort=votes
http://zoonek2.free.fr/UNIX/48_R/all.html
posted by chrisamiller at 3:43 PM on March 14, 2009

There's a fantastic R graphics gallery with thumbnailed images which lead you to snippets of appropriate code. It's a quick way to find out how to coax R into doing something Tufte'd be pleased with. The maintainer of it has a blog as well, http://romainfrancois.blog.free.fr, and many (the majority?) of his entries are R-related.

grouse, that's all kinds of awesome. Can't believe I'm only learning about rseek now. Thank you!
posted by Westringia F. at 4:00 PM on March 14, 2009

I'll add:

CRANberries (feed of updates and new packages posted to the Comprehensive R Archive Network)
Revolution Computing's blog is pretty much all R all the time
Gregor Gorjanc's blog intersperses topical posts about his area (genetics) with more general R tips
posted by shelbaroo at 4:19 PM on March 14, 2009

I love the blog Flowing Data. They just had a post today about a workshop where R is being taught.
posted by orsonet at 6:28 PM on March 14, 2009

The R mailing list and gallery are good resources. I also recommend Dalgaard's Introductory Statistics with R, which I pull off the shelf every now and again.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:49 PM on March 14, 2009

I don't have any of the links, but in searching for answers to my own problems with R I came across a couple blogs that discuss using stats for a specific field (usually using R), and they were quite useful. That's for a very user-oriented view, of course. In terms of a language-oriented view, I don't know -- reading through the developer docs & a bit of the source code was probably when the biggest leap in my R learning happened.
posted by devilsbrigade at 7:38 PM on March 14, 2009

Maybe Brendan O’Connor’s Blog
posted by clueless22 at 10:33 AM on March 15, 2009

This one is good for programming tips, especially if you participate in Project Euler: The Research Kitchen
posted by jonesor at 4:39 AM on March 16, 2009