I am a strong proponent of R for all data management, analysis and visualization. It is a truly egalitarian analysis package -open source and community-contributed analysis packages. The true power comes from complete control and automization of your analyzes as well as publicly accessible new functions created by members of the community. However, the drawback for a lot of people has been the rather steep learning curve, as with any programing language. But there are now a plethora of good books available that help shorten this curve. The Human Landscapes blog as reviewed and ranked introductory and reference R books, which should serve as an invaluable resource for those striving to become aRgonauts.
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Shortening the R curve
I am a strong proponent of R for all data management, analysis and visualization. It is a truly egalitarian analysis package -open source and community-contributed analysis packages. The true power comes from complete control and automization of your analyzes as well as publicly accessible new functions created by members of the community. However, the drawback for a lot of people has been the rather steep learning curve, as with any programing language. But there are now a plethora of good books available that help shorten this curve. The Human Landscapes blog as reviewed and ranked introductory and reference R books, which should serve as an invaluable resource for those striving to become aRgonauts.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Are there any good blogs for R? I like http://www.r-phylo.org/wiki/Main_Page
Their list is conspicuously missing Bolker's new book "Ecological Models and Data in R." This is a very good intro to using R, modeling and statistics in Ecology.
Thanks for the comments. First, I think that R wikis are the best way to get a sense of what folks are talking about and the basic R wiki is a good start (http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php) - as well as the R phylo wiki.
Also, Ben Bolker's book is great and you can actually download the chapters from his website. The focus of that book is to introduce the reader to methods of data-model fitting and uses R as the tool. This book will no doubt be the core of many graduate courses for years to come.
MC
FYI, if folk are interested in purchasing any of these books, and helping out the Western Society of Naturalists, they can go here.
Post a Comment