2.11 Additional resources
My Computerworld Beginner's Guide to R. Available on the Computerworld website at https://www.computerworld.com/article/1533880/beginners-guide-to-r-introduction.html.
RStudio Tips on Twitter Follow the account @rstudiotips. You can scan prior tips at https://twitter.com/rstudiotips.
RStudio IDE Easy Tricks you Might’ve Missed. Some useful tips from RStudio at https://rviews.rstudio.com/2016/11/11/easy-tricks-you-mightve-missed/.
Installation help. No matter how many step-by-step instructions a book includes, there may be times when software won’t install properly on someone’s computer. It’s simply not possible to anticipate every problem, whether conflicts with other installed programs or firewall/network difficulties.
If you’re having issues, you may want to try searching for similar error messages. You can start off with Google, but if that doesn’t work, try searching on the developers’ site Stack Overflow at stackoverflow.com – include the R language tag [r] in your search – or RStudio’s community https://community.rstudio.com.
If you need to post a question, give as many details as you can. For example, “I’m trying to install package X and it’s not working” doesn’t give readers any idea what’s going wrong. “I’m getting the following error message when trying to install package X with the code install.packages(”PackageX“) on my Windows 10 system running R version 3.4.4:” along with the error message would be better.
2024 Update: Generative AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or AI-powered search engines like Perplexity are another new option for getting help with coding questions. ChatGPT is especially good at explaining code you find elsewhere but don’t understand. However, I find that ChatGPT R code doesn’t always work, and it can be hard for people brand new to R to figure out how to debug it.
Hopefully, though, you won’t need this kind of help at the outset of your R journey!