aRrgh: a newcomer's (angry) guide to R

Tim Smith <arrgh@tim-smith.us>, @biotimylated

with Kevin Ushey <kevinushey@gmail.com>, @kevin_ushey

Introduction

R is a shockingly dreadful language for an exceptionally useful data analysis environment. The more you learn about the R language, the worse it will feel. The development environment suffers from literally decades of accretion of stupid hacks from a community containing, to a first-order approximation, zero software engineers. R makes me want to kick things almost every time I use it.

But there are a lot of great tools that are built in R. ggplot2 is first-in-class and Bioconductor packages are often essential. Sometimes there's aught to do but grin and bear (though never without a side of piss and moan).

The documentation is inanely bad. I can't explain it. aRrgh is my attempt to explain the language to myself. aRrgh exists as a living document and will continue to grow -- it is not complete, but it got to a point where it seemed like it was probably useful so I decided to toss it on the web. It should be correct and it's a bug if it isn't. Please email me or file issues on Github.

The goal of the document is to describe R's data types and structures while offering enough help with the syntax to get a programmer coming from another, saner language into a more comfortable place.

Table of contents

• Basic syntax: crash course and gotchas; finding help
• Atomic vectors: R's simplest data types; logic values; vectorizing; arrays
• Factors: A useful and misunderstood data type. Where they come from, how to handle them
• Data frames: R's structure for tabular data. How to create them, access semantics

To come?:

• Indexing
• Lists
• Namespaces

Colophon

© Tim Smith 2012-3. This work is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

If you enjoyed this, you will probably enjoy PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design, which is even more cathartic.