R for Data Science, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Workflow: Getting Help

This book is not an island; there is no single resource that will allow you to master R. As you begin to apply the techniques described in this book to your own data, you will soon find questions that we do not answer. This section describes a few tips on how to get help and to help you keep learning.

Google Is Your Friend

If you get stuck, start with Google. Typically adding “R” to a query is enough to restrict it to relevant results: if the search isn’t useful, it often means that there aren’t any R-specific results available. Additionally, adding package names like “tidyverse” or “ggplot2” will help narrow down the results to code that will feel more familiar to you as well, e.g., “how to make a boxplot in R” versus “how to make a boxplot in R with ggplot2.” Google is particularly useful for error messages. If you get an error message and you have no idea what it means, try googling it! Chances are that someone else has been confused by it in the past, and there will be help somewhere on the web. (If the error message isn’t in English, run Sys.setenv(LANGUAGE = "en") and rerun the code; you’re more likely to find help for English error messages.)

If Google doesn’t help, try Stack Overflow. Start by spending a little time searching for an existing answer, including [R], to restrict your search to questions and answers that use R.

Making a reprex

If your googling doesn’t find anything useful, it’s a really good idea to prepare a reprex, short ...