On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 17:27 -0500, malcolm McCallum wrote: > I want to sit down and learn R. > Where is the best place to start?
R has a steep learning curve. In my experience in helping colleagues to start using R, unless you can set aside a good chunk of time to learn by yourself and you stick at it you'll end up getting frustrated that something you know how to do in <insert software name> takes seconds you can't get R to do it. (Annoyingly, R will probably do it more quickly, and with less effort, once you know the correct incantation.) For those of us with day jobs (I learned to use R when a grad student and my supervisor had just move to another institution) setting aside this time may be difficult. If you can get yourself onto a short course near to you, you'll probably find the initial slog up the learning curve easier. If that is not possible, I'd recommend Peter Dalgaard's book Introductory Statistics with R (2008, Springer, Second Edition) as an excellent, low level intro to R, which covers a good range of common statistical methods. Peter is one of the R Core Development team so he knows what he is taking about. You don't need to buy a book of course. There is a lot of contributed documentation: http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html The first 3 on there are good introductory texts, depending on your level or what you wish to learn. IIRC, all three have been updated/improved into published books --- I have copies and they are all very good. More R books can be found here: http://www.r-project.org/doc/bib/R-books.html Don't forget the manual 'An Introduction to R' that comes with R or you can download from: http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html The 'R Data Import/Export' manual also contains useful info on getting data into and out of R. There is also now a growing number of titles in Springers useR series. These are meant to be low cost (!?) books that focus on a particular topic and show how R is used to apply techniques common to the topic: http://www.springer.com/series/6991 Someone mentioned Ben Bolker's book - it might sound appealing as it has the words "Ecological" in the title, but don't buy this without looking at it first. Don't get me wrong - I have a copy and think it is great - but unless you are a theoretical ecologist and/or are familiar with writing out likelihood functions and optimising them given some data, this may not be the book for you (yet). It certainly isn't a book to learn how to use R with, and spends a lot of time on constructing analysis methods for non-standard problems rather than say teaching models such as linear, or mixed effects etc that might be fit with standard R functions. Once you've taken the plunge, sign yourself up for the R-SIG-Ecology list, which is fairly low traffic. If you don't mind lots of email, then the R Help list is a goldmine of information and I learned a lot just by following the discussions and trying to understand the solutions to posted questions. Just do your homework first and read the posting guide! The mailing list details can be found here: http://www.r-project.org/mail.html To start orienting your way through the ~2000 add-on packages on CRAN, take a look at the Task Views, which arrange information into subject areas and list packages for common analyses encountered within each subject area: http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/ That should be enough to get you started ;-) G > > Malcolm > > On Tue, Jun 2, 2009 at 4:58 PM, Gavin Simpson <gavin.simp...@ucl.ac.uk> wrote: > > On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 14:15 -0700, AdRiAnA HuMaNeS wrote: > >> Dear Listers: > >> I am writing to ask if anyone knows a statistical program besides > >> PERMANOVA= > >> that can do ANOVAS of mixed designs with four factors (two orthogonals > >> and= > >> two nested) and unbalanced data, > >> > >> Best Regards > >> > >> Adriana Humanes > > > > Function adonis() in the vegan package for R can fit this type of model. > > > > You can find out more here: > > > > http://cran.r-project.org/package=vegan > > > > HTH, > > > > G > > > > -- > > %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% > > Dr. Gavin Simpson [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522 > > ECRC, UCL Geography, [f] +44 (0)20 7679 0565 > > Pearson Building, [e] gavin.simpsonATNOSPAMucl.ac.uk > > Gower Street, London [w] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfagls/ > > UK. WC1E 6BT. [w] http://www.freshwaters.org.uk > > %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% > > > > > -- %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~% Dr. Gavin Simpson [t] +44 (0)20 7679 0522 ECRC, UCL Geography, [f] +44 (0)20 7679 0565 Pearson Building, [e] gavin.simpsonATNOSPAMucl.ac.uk Gower Street, London [w] http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucfagls/ UK. WC1E 6BT. [w] http://www.freshwaters.org.uk %~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%~%
