R resources (free courses, books, tutorials, & cheat sheets)

Below is a list of free books, tutorials, packages, cheat sheets and other material to learn programming in R and improve your workflow. There are separate overviews for Python resources, SQL resources, and general Data Science, Machine Learning, & Statistics resources. If you have additions, please comment below or contact me!

Completely new to R? → Start here!

LAST UPDATED: 26-03-2018

R Basics

Cheat Sheets:

Introductory Books:

Online Courses: Introductory & Advanced:

Style Guides:

Google’s R Style Guide
Advanced R Style Guide by Hadley Wickham
A guide for switching from base R to the tidyverse.

Data Visualization in R

Colors

R Color Guide***
colourpicker – widget that allows users to choose colours
ggplot2 colour guide***
multicolored annotated text in ggplot2 by Andrew Whitby & Visuelle Data

Interactive / HTML widgets:

R HTML Widgets Gallery***
plotly – interactive plots
d3heatmap – interactive d3 heatmaps
DT – interactive tables
DiagrammeR – interactive diagrams
dygraphs – interactive time series plots
formattable – formattable data structures
ggvis – interactive ggplot2
Highcharter – interactive Highcharts plots
leaflet – interactive maps
metricsgraphics – interactive JavaScript bare-bones line, scatterplot and bar charts
networkD3 – interative d3 network graphs
scatterD3 – interactive scatterplots with d3
rbokeh – interactive Bokeh plots
rCharts – interactive Javascript charts
rcdimple – interactive JavaScript bar charts and others
rglwidget – interactive 3d plots
threejs – interactive 3d plots and globes
visNetwork – interactive network graphs
wordcloud2 – interface to wordcloud2.js.
timevis – interactive timelines

ggplot2

Code examples of top-50 ggplot2 visualizations***
ggplot2 Cheatsheet by RStudio
ggplot2 Quick Reference Guide
ggplot2 Code Snippets
ggplot2 Code Snippets 2
A practical introduction with R and ggplot2 (Healy, 2017)
Data Vizualization: A practical introduction (Healy, 2018)
Hitchhiker’s Guide to ggplot2 in R (Burchell & Vargas, 2016)
Setting custom ggplot themes with ggthemr
Creating custom, reproducible color palettes by Simon Jackson
Rearranging values within ggplot2 facets
Combine plots using patchwork or cowplot
ggplot2 extensions overview***
- ggthemes – plot style themes
- hrbrthemes – opinionated, typographic-centric themes
- ggmap – maps with Google Maps, Open Street Maps, etc.
- ggiraph – interactive ggplots
- ggstance – horizontal versions of common plots
- GGally – scatterplot matrices
- ggalt – additional coordinate systems, geoms, etc.
- ggforce – additional geoms, etc.
- ggrepel – prevent plot labels from overlapping
- ggraph – graphs, networks, trees and more
- ggpmisc – photo-biology related extensions
- geomnet – network visualization
- ggExtra – marginal histograms for a plot
- gganimate – animations
- ggspectra – tools for plotting light spectra
- ggnetwork – geoms to plot networks
- ggradar – radar charts
- ggsurvplot (survminer) – survival curves
- ggseas – seasonal adjustment tools
- ggtech – style themes for plots
- ggtern – ternary diagrams
- ggTimeSeries – time series visualizations
- ggtree – tree visualizations
- treemapify – wilcox’s treemaps

Miscellaneous

coefplot – visualizes model statistics
circlize – circular visualizations for categorical data
quantmod – candlestick financial charts
colorspace – HSL based color palettes
viridis – Matplotlib viridis color pallete for R
munsell – Munsell color palettes for R.
Cairo – high-quality display output
igraph – Network Analysis and Visualization
lattice – Trellis graphics
tmap – thematic maps
trelliscopejs – interactive alternative for ggplot2::facet_wrap
rgl – interactive 3D plots
corrplot – graphical display of a correlation matrix
googleVis – Google Charts API
plotROC – interactive ROC plots
extrafont – fonts in R graphics
showtext – text using system fonts
animation – animated graphics using ImageMagick.
misc3d – 3d plots, isosurfaces, etc.
xkcd – xkcd style graphics
imager – CImg library to work with images

Dashboards & Shiny

Shiny Cheat Sheet by RStudio
More Shiny Resources by Rob Gilmore
More Shiny Resources for Statistics by Yingjie Hu
Shiny Tutorial
Building Shiny apps – an interactive tutorial by Dean Attali
flexdashboard – dashboard creation simplified
colourpicker – widget that allows users to choose colours.

Regular Expressions in R

R Markdown & Documentation

R Markdown Cheatsheet by RStudio
R Markdown Reference Guide by RStudio
R Markdown Basics
Markdown Tutorial by RStudio
Markdown Gallery by RStudio
The knitr book (Xie, 2015)
Creating slides with R Markdown (Video) by Brian Caffo
General Markdown Cheatsheet
blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown (Xie, Thomas, & Hill, 2018)
blogdown tutorials
Packages:
- tidystats – automating updating of model statistics
- papaja – preparing APA journal articles
- blogdown – build websites with Markdown & Hugo
- huxtable – create Excel, html, & LaTeX tables

R Database Linking

Tutorial: Database Queries with R
Introduction to sparklyr by DataCamp
dbplot – leverages dplyr to process calculations of plot inside database

Functional Programming

Statistical Learning, Machine Learning, & Data Science

Natural Language Processing & Text Mining

Text Mining Tutorial with tm
Tidy Text Mining (Silges & Robinson, 2017) with tidytext
Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature (Jockers, 2014)
100 Tutorials for Learning R
21 Recipes for Mining Twitter Data (Rudis, 2017) with rtweet
Course: Introduction to Text Analytics with R @DataScienceDojo
Course: Twitter Text Mining and Social Network Analysis (Zhoa, 2016) @RDataMining with twitteR
List of resources for NLP & Text Mining by Stephen Thomas
Packages — for an overview: CRAN Task View – Natural Language Processing:
- tm – text mining.
- tidytext – text mining using tidyverse principles
- quanteda – framework for quantitative text analysis
- gutenbergr – public domain works (free books to practice on)
- corpora – statistics and data sets for corpus frequency data.
- tau – Text Analysis Utilities
- Sentiment140 – headache-free sentiment analysis
- sentimentr – sentiment analysis using text polarity
- openNLP – sentence detector, tokenizer, pos-tagger, shallow and full syntactic parser, named-entity detector, and maximum entropy models with OpenNLP.
- cleanNLP – natural language processing via tidy data models
- RSentiment – English lexicon-based sentiment analysis with negation and sarcasm detection functionalities.
- RWeka – data mining tasks with Weka
- wordnet – a large lexical database of English with WordNet .
- stringi – language processing wrappers
- textcat – provides support for n-gram based text categorization.
- text2vec – text vectorization, topic modeling (LDA, LSA), word embeddings (GloVe), and similarities.
- lsa – Latent Semantic Analysis
- topicmodels -Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and Correlated Topics Models (CTM)
- lda -Latent Dirichlet Allocation and related models