How to follow and engage with the R community
“R is not just a programming language, but it is also an interactive environment for doing data science.”
“Investing a little time in learning R each day will pay off handsomely in the long run."—
Hadley Wickham and Garret Grolemund in R for Data Science.
When i have heard for the first time about R, i was a student in Bsc in agronomy in Ivory Coast. My professor of statistics just told me that R was great comparing to other statistical software and gave me the link to the site of the comprehensive R archive network. Nobody could help me learn or know more on R in Ivory Coast from my attempts to find peoples to help me.
So one day searching on internet, going from links to links, i have found R-bloggers and Rstudio. After that found Hadley Wickham and begin to get interested really on learning R.
The best things i have found in R is that R is also one of the best community around in every ways that could help a beginR growing in R. All i know on R today comes from posts, links, helps, tips and encouragment from the R community.
To stay current with the R community i mostly used Twiiter. Twitter is one of the key tools used by the R community, and we can add blogs and websites, but i clearly recommend to beginR to have a twitter account and to follow and get involved in the R community.
After this first step, if you plan to do a carreer in data science or relative fields you should start a blog and visit regularly others blogs and websites.
Below, i have put a list of peoples, blogs and websites that help me and continue to be a great source of infoRmations to stay current. This list is reflect my own point of view and surely lack some importants links you probably think as important (please leave a comment below) and don’t forget that this list is just a at least list.
While this post aims to help beginR, it could also be of good help for more experienced useRs. This post will be updated at least every year to help peoples.
Hashtags
Usually, on twitter you should use the hashtags #rstats, #R or #rstudio to find out what is going around R. You should also learn to use rtweet.
People to follow on twitter
- Hadley Wickham @hadleywickham
- Yihui Xie @xieyihui
- David Robinson @drob
- Jenny Bryan @JennyBryan
- Julia Silge @juliasilge
- Karl Browman @kwbroman
- Hilary Parker @hpster
- Garret Grolemund @StatGarrett
- Joe Cheng @jcheng
- Charlotte Wickham @CVWickham
- Jeroen Ooms @opencpu
- Jim Hester @jimhester_
- Mara Averick @dataandme
- Roger D. Peng @rdpeng
- Jeff Leek @jtleek
- Karthik Ram @_inundata
- Amber Thomas @ProQuesAsker
- Alison Hill @apreshill
Organizations to follow on twitter
- Rstudio @rstudio
- R-bloggers @Rbloggers
- Bioconductor (for people working in bioinformatics or life science like me) @Bioconductor
Webpages to visit daily
Blog pages
I strongly recommend you to take a look at the webpage of:
- Hadley Wickham
- Yihui Xie
- David Robinson
- Hilary Parker
- Julia Silge
- Maëlle Salmon
- R Studio blog
- Alison Hill
- Amber Thomas
- Simply statistics
Check also webpages of others R masters. You can generally find links to their websites on the profile page of their twitter accounts.
Online books
- R for data science authored by Hadley Wickham and Garret Grolemund.
- Blogdown: creating websites with R Markdown authored by Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas and Alison Presmanes Hill.
Finally
One of the benefits of be engaged with the community is helpful and useful links that comes with tweets. I think that you cannot correctly grow in your learning of R without being engaged with the R community. So this little article take place as an advice if you plan to learn, to get involved or learn more in R. I can say that if you want to know what is going in R you just have to open your twitter page and read your feed.