YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R

Amanda Miotto, QCIF's eResearch Analyst at Griffith University, highly recommends YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R, an introductory online book about statistical program R.

YaRrr! The Pirate’s Guide to R, by Nathaniel D. Phillips, is a comprehensive online book to help users of statistical program R learn it from the ground up.   This is an amazingly good resource: the language is clear to understand, in plain English without a lot of technical jargon, and the concepts are demonstrated with practical examples. Plus, there are plenty of pirate puns, which keeps the learning fun.   The guide introduces you to the basic analytical tools in R, from basic coding and analyses, to data wrangling, plotting, and statistical inference. An overview is provided of the following:

• how to get started

• the basics

• scalars and vectors

• matrices and dataframes

• importing, saving and managing data

• plotting

• hypothesis tests

• ANOVA

• regression

• custom functions, and

• loops. 

My favourite chapter is titled “Why R is like a relationship…”, which sets out the good times versus bad times with R, and why, if you stick with it, it will eventually become the Ryan Gosling of boyfriends.   

Nathaniel is a psychologist with a background in statistics and judgment and decision-making, who wishes he was a pirate.

This article was first published on 26/03/2020.