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.. title: Getting Help with R
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<div id="functions" class="section level1">
<h1>Functions</h1>
<p>The first place to look is to use the search box in the <em>Help</em> tab of RStudio.</p>
<p>If you start typing in either the console or editor in RStudio and hit <code>[TAB]</code>, the RStudio will show a list of completions as well as a short help for each.</p>
<p>There are several R functions to get help using either <code>?</code> or <code>help</code>. For example to find help for a function <code>quantile</code>, you can use either</p>
<pre class="r"><code>?quantile</code></pre>
<p>or</p>
<pre class="r"><code>help("quantile")</code></pre>
<p>To find the help pages available for a package, use <code>help</code> with the <code>package</code> argument. For example,</p>
<pre class="r"><code>help(package = "tidyr")</code></pre>
<p>Want to find out what datasets are included in the R packages that you have installed?</p>
<pre class="r"><code>data()</code></pre>
<p>To find datasets included in a specific package, use <code>data</code> with the <code>package</code> argument, For example,</p>
<pre class="r"><code>data(package = "ggplot2")</code></pre>
<p>The help for R functions is only useful if you know what function you need want to know either what it is doing, or what the arguments are. The help files in R are not useful for understanding what a package does or how to use it. However, <em>vignettes</em> for R packages are often overviews of the functionality of packages that serve as tutorials or introductions to using the package. To get a list of all vignettes of the packages your have installed, run</p>
<pre class="r"><code>browseVignettes()</code></pre>
<p>To get the list of vignettes for a specific package, run</p>
<pre class="r"><code>browseVignettes("dplyr")</code></pre>
<p>You can also find vignettes for packages you have not installed on the packages’ CRAN page [<a href="https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tidyr/index.html" class="uri">https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tidyr/index.html</a>]<a href="https://github.com/hadley/dplyr" class="uri">https://github.com/hadley/dplyr</a>)“. There is also a <code>vignette</code> function, but you need the exact name of the vignette, which you generally do not know.</p>
<p>Note that <code>search()</code> <strong>does not</strong> do what you expect it to do, unless you expect it to return the search path in which R looks for packages.</p>
</div>
<div id="internet" class="section level1">
<h1>Internet</h1>
<p><a href="http://www.rdocumentation.org/">Rdocumentation.org</a> searches the documentation of all R packages on CRAN and more</p>
<p>Google has gotten better with R searches, but <code>R</code> is a particularly unfriendly search term. However, if you are searching for “R” with other words in context, you are likely to have some success. An alternative is to use <a href="http://rseek.org">rseek.org</a> instead. It is a Google search restricted to a curated set of sites related to R.</p>
<p>Many R packages have an article in either the <a href="http://www.jstatsoft.org/index">Journal of Statistical Software</a> or <a href="https://journal.r-project.org/">The R Journal</a> These articles are similar to package does.</p>
<p><a href="https://stackoverflow.com">Stack Overflow</a> is a question and answer website for computer programming questions. Search for questions about R using the “r” tag. You can do this by adding <code>[r]</code> to your search query. Other tags that may be useful are <code>[ggplot2]</code>, <code>[plyr]</code>. However, generally you should not need to <em>ask</em> questions for this course. Someone has likely already asked your question before.</p>
<p>If you have a question about “statistics” or “data analysis” rather than “R”, then <a href="https://stats.stackexchange.com/">Cross Validated</a> is a Q-and-A site like Stack Overflow, but for statistics and machine learning.</p>
</div>
<div id="cheatsheets" class="section level1">
<h1>Cheatsheets</h1>
<p>RStudio has several very good <a href="https://www.rstudio.com/resources/cheatsheets/">cheatsheets</a></p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/rstudio-IDE-cheatsheet.pdf">RStudio IDE</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ggplot2-cheatsheet-2.0.pdf">Data Visualization</a> (ggplot2)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/data-wrangling-cheatsheet.pdf">Data Wrangling</a> (dplyr, tidyr, lubridate, tidyr)</li>
<li><a href="http://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/rmarkdown-cheatsheet.pdf">R Markdown</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/rmarkdown-reference.pdf">R Markdown Reference Guide</a></li>
</ul>
<p>The <a href="https://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Short-refcard.pdf">Short R Reference Card</a> is the classic cheatsheet. However, some of the data manipulation and plotting functions are not those we use in this course, but it does cover much of the statistical functions.</p>
</div>
<div id="books" class="section level1">
<h1>Books</h1>
<p>Two references organized by task are <a href="http://www.cookbook-r.com">The Cookbook for R</a> and <a href="http://www.statmethods.net/">Quick-R</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers</a> aggregates R-related blogging.</p>
<p>On twitter, the R hashtag is <code>#rstats</code>. Some prominent R-related people and accounts on twitter are: <span class="citation">[@R-bloggers]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/Rbloggers" class="uri">https://twitter.com/Rbloggers</a>) <span class="citation">[@RevolutionR]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/RevolutionR" class="uri">https://twitter.com/RevolutionR</a>), <span class="citation">[@isDotR]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/isDotR" class="uri">https://twitter.com/isDotR</a>), <span class="citation">[@swirlstats]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/swirlstats" class="uri">https://twitter.com/swirlstats</a>), <span class="citation">[@rOpenGov]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/rOpenGov" class="uri">https://twitter.com/rOpenGov</a>), <span class="citation">[@JennyBryan]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/JennyBryan" class="uri">https://twitter.com/JennyBryan</a>), <span class="citation">[@rOpenSci]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/rOpenSci" class="uri">https://twitter.com/rOpenSci</a>), <span class="citation">[@rstudio]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/rstudio" class="uri">https://twitter.com/rstudio</a>), <span class="citation">[@inside_R]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/inside_R" class="uri">https://twitter.com/inside_R</a>), <span class="citation">[@cboettig]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/cboettig" class="uri">https://twitter.com/cboettig</a>), <span class="citation">[@ramnath_vaidya]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/ramnath_vaidya" class="uri">https://twitter.com/ramnath_vaidya</a>), <span class="citation">[@eddelbuettel]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/eddelbuettel" class="uri">https://twitter.com/eddelbuettel</a>), <span class="citation">[@benmarwick]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/benmarwick" class="uri">https://twitter.com/benmarwick</a>), <span class="citation">[@thosjleeper]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/thosjleeper" class="uri">https://twitter.com/thosjleeper</a>), <span class="citation">[@STAT545]</span>(<a href="https://twitter.com/STAT545" class="uri">https://twitter.com/STAT545</a>).</p>
<p>Do you want to know what packages exist for a given topic? <a href="https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/">CRAN Task Views</a> provide subject matter groupings of R packages. Some potentially useful task-views to social scientists are:</p>
<pre><code>- [Econometrics](https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Econometrics.html)
- [Natural Language Processing](https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/NaturalLanguageProcessing.html)
- [Official Statistics & Survey Methodology](https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/OfficialStatistics.html)
- [Reproducible Research](https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/ReproducibleResearch.html)
- [Spatial](https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Spatial.html)
- [Survival Analysis](https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/Survival.html)
- [Time Series](https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/TimeSeries.html)
- [Web Technologies and Services](https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/WebTechnologies.html)
- [Social Sciences](https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/SocialSciences.html)</code></pre>
</div>
<div id="how-to-ask-for-help" class="section level1">
<h1>How to ask for help</h1>
<p>How to write a minimal reproducible example <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example" class="uri">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example</a></p>
<p>If you are going to ask for help, it is important to know how to ask for help</p>
<ul>
<li>Coding Killed the Cat “How to ask programming question” <a href="https://codingkilledthecat.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/how-to-ask-for-programming-help/" class="uri">https://codingkilledthecat.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/how-to-ask-for-programming-help/</a></li>
<li>Matt Gemmell, “What Have You Tried?” <a href="http://mattgemmell.com/what-have-you-tried/" class="uri">http://mattgemmell.com/what-have-you-tried/</a></li>
</ul>
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