How to learn R and ggplot2?

>>7963145
What do you mean "learn in a day"? Of course you won't learn all libraries of R in a single day. You won't even learn all of them in a year. Or do you only mean basic syntax?

Posting for interest. Need R for research this summer

>>7963150
basic syntax and graphing, also i'm wondering in what ways it's better than excel

>R
if you have prior programming experience, sure. google is your friend. look stuff up from the REPL by sticking a ? in front of the command

without prior experience, i doubt it. R is high level and pretty simple so you're really just asking "can i learn how to program in a day" and that's really hard to say but the answer is probably no

>ggplot2
if you already know R, you can get the basics of ggplot2 down in a day, sure. however, ggplot2 is kind of like LaTeX in that if you want to do something with it that it wasn't specifically built to do, it'll be a pain in the ass

>>7963153
>also i'm wondering in what ways it's better than excel
better plotting just for a start - excel's plots are just straight up garbage

it also has very convenient functions and syntax for manipulating data tables, which really makes data easier to work with. something that would take twenty minutes of manual copying and pasting in excel could take three lines of code if you know what you're doing

>>7963162
You can get a near publication standard graph in excel in seconds. Just highlight a dataset and click a couple of times and out comes a scatter graph.

>>7963176
>publication quality
don't make me laugh

>>7963154
any advantages of ggplot over basic plot?

>>7963186
A different syntax and grammar for plot construction and better out-of-box graphs (although both base graphics and ggplot2 need work to be publication quality)

>>7963205
at what point does a graph become publication quality?

>>7963220
when a publication would accept it

generally: fix the colors, fix the sizes of axes/legends/datapoints, make sure there's no extraneous elements, make sure no elements are hiding any other elements, make sure it looks good printed small instead of big on your computer screen

>>7963230
Alright, awesome. So as a newbie who has no programming experience at all, what would the best way to learn R be? already downloaded swirl, will that give me the sufficient tools I need to use the software to its full extent?

>>7963256
i have no experience with swirl so i can't speak to that, but in general i would recommend first learning the absolute basics of the data structures, bread-and-butter commands, how loops work, stuff like that, and then giving yourself a small project

start really simple, something like "generate two vectors A and B, where B is the result of a function on the elements of A" and then plot A against B. maybe start with dirt-simple stuff like linear transformations, then slightly more complicated functions like exponentials or whatnot

then move on to working with actual data - R has a bunch of handy built in datasets to test stuff on, like the Iris dataset. make some calculations on that data and then plot the results, or summaries of the data, or something

and then maybe from there, i dunno, get a sample dataset from out in the wild and do some visualization and analysis of it. look at basic properties - what distribution does it look like it best fits, can you find any interesting pairs of variables to graph against each other, can you recreate a published graph

>>7963145
These anons speak the truth
>>7963150
>>7963154
R is a difficult program to immediately pick up syntax and utility.

Thenewboston is pretty good to learn the basics of a language you don't know

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X67No4239Ys

>>7964119
No way, the syntax is dead simple. It's standard high-level programming syntax. It does vector slicing like everything else, it does functions like everything else, it does brackets like everything else. The only things it does different is support <- for assignment in addition to = and the data frame column calling uses $ instead of whatever character other languages use.

>>7964175
If you have no programming experience, picking up syntax is difficult.

>>7964188
That will be true of any language, R is no different.

>>7964191
you think syntax is equally difficult among languages if you have no experience? that's false.

>>7963179
>>7963176
wtf publication quality. i don't see anything special about graphs in papers at top journals. what are you faggots on about

>>7965353
Unless you're coding in something old or weird like LISP or Perl or Haskell, most of the languages a beginner will encounter have basically equivalent syntax.

>>7965388
you a student?

>>7963145
You could learn to make some good graphs

python vs R for data sience
which one is better /sci/?

>>7963186
https://flowingdata.com/2016/03/22/comparing-ggplot2-and-r-base-graphics/

>>7966509
R, eventually it will be Python and after that Julia