Help!?
If you are stuck doing something in R, the quickest way to find help, is to get information on the functions that you are using from R itself. For instance, if you want to know more about ggplot’s histograms, you can type ?geom_histogram
. This will give you the minimial information in order to understand the function. I find the information provided by R rather difficult to read at times, so I’ll typically use google. The ‘official’ ggplot-pages are incredibly helpful: http://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/reference/geom_histogram.html.
The stackoverflow-pages are also very helpful, because they present problems that people have had and their solutions. Nine times out of ten, you’re not the first who came across a particular problem. For example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21027548/cropping-extra-white-space-in-a-plot-made-using-ggplot-package-in-r
As we’ve seen, the cheatsheets provided by RStudio are also very helpful (https://www.rstudio.com/resources/cheatsheets/).
I also recommend the following books:
Hadley Wickham – ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. (Wickham 2016) see here
Hadley Wickham & Garrett Grolemund – R for Data Science. (Garrett Grolemund 2017) see here
Winston Chang – R-graphics cookbook. (Chang 2012) see here
Kieran Healy – Data Visualization for Social Science. (Healy 2018) see here