CMU LibGuides: Heinz College: 90-872 Using R for Public Data Analysis: Resources for Using R and RStudio

Books for Learning R

R for Data Science by Hadley Wickham; Garrett Grolemund
This is an excellent go-to resource for R and is freely available online. This book introduces you to R, RStudio, and the tidyverse, a collection of R packages designed to work together to make data science fast, fluent, and fun. Suitable for readers with no previous programming experience, R for Data Science is designed to get you doing data science as quickly as possible.
ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis by Hadley Wickham
Provides both rich theory and powerful applications for using ggplot2 to create visualizations in R.

More books on R

Online Courses and Learning

LinkedIn Learning (formerly lynda.com) Training Videos and Tutorials
Includes courses related to R including: Leaning R, R Essential Training, R for Data Science and Data Visualization in R with ggplot2.

Sage Campus This link opens in a new window
Sage Campus provides access to a growing collection of online courses on introductory skills and research methods including critical thinking, data literacy, research design, R and Python, statistical methods and more. NOTE: You must create an account using your CMU email address. If you are an instructor, please contact Sarah Young to upgrade your account in order to manage student cohorts.

RStudio Education
RStudio is a commonly used software environment for programming the R language. RStudio Education offers useful learning tools and resources to get started with R and RStudio.
swirl
swirl teaches you R programming and data science interactively, at your own pace, and right in the R console.

Open Science and Data Collaboration (OSDC) Workshop Mini-Series

The CMU Libraries Open Science and Data Collaborations (OSDC) program offers a series of workshops related to data wrangling and analysis using open source tools like R and OpenRefine. Follow the links below to view and download the full lessons for these workshops.

CMU Libraries Open Science Workshop Mini-Series
This series of workshops is periodically offered during the academic year, but all of the curriculum is freely available online.
CMU Libraries: Introduction to R Lesson
This links to a PDF containing the full lesson content for the CMU Libraries Introduction to R workshop. The workshop introduces basic R concepts and the dplyr package.
CMU Libraries Data Visualization with R Lesson
This links to a PDF of the full lesson for the CMU Libraries Data Visualization with R workshop. The workshop focuses on using the ggplot2 package.

In addition to the lesson content, you can view a series of short videos that walk through the content covered in these workshops. Follow the links below to get to our YouTube playlists with these video series.

Introduction to R Video Playlist
This series of short videos walks you through the full content of the Introduction to R lesson.
Data Visualization with R Video Playlist
This series of short videos walks you through the full content of the Data Visualization with R lesson.

Finding help with coding

Coding in R, whether you're an expert, novice or beginner, almost always involves building on other's code and learning from the broader coding community. Googling for answers to your coding questions, like troubleshooting error messages or figuring out how to get a plot to look a certain way, is part of the normal process of R programming. Here are a few useful websites and resources that can help you through your coding journey.

Stack Overflow
This is one of the most common places to find answers to your coding questions. Anyone is welcome to post questions to Stack Overflow and guidance for how to ask a good question is available.
R Cheatsheets
There are numerous 'cheat sheets' developed for commonly used packages that can serve as useful references while coding.
R Color Cheatsheet
Finding the best colors for your plots and visualizations in R can be challenging. This handy cheat sheet gives you the names of the many color options available.
Working with US Census Data in R
A list of some useful R packages for working with data from the Census and American Community Survey.
The R Graph Gallery
The R Graph Gallery is a useful resource for exploring the many different ways of visualizing data in R. It points you to useful R packages for creating different types of plots and graphs.

Many R packages come with useful resources that can help you navigate the various functions and options available. For example, many packages include reference manuals with a full description of package functions and arguments. Some also offer a vignette, which is a more narrative style example of how the package can be used. Reference manuals and vignettes for two popular packages that you'll be using in this course, dplyr and ggplot2, are linked to below.