If you’re just starting out learning how to work with R, do yourself a huge favor and install R Studio immediately after R. R Studio is an “integrated development environment” that interfaces with R. In practical terms, R Studio provides some graphical user interface that tidies up  your workflow within R but still maintains the command line feel and control of R.

Here is a screenshot of R Studio in action with some code I was recently writing. Neat!

After installing R Studio, you’re going to want some references. Here’s my short list of useful books and websites.

Books

• The R Book (Crawley)
• R Graphics Cookbook (Chang)
• ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Wickham)
• Mixed Effects Models and Extensions in Ecology with R (Zuur et al.)

Websites

• Cookbook for R   companion to the R Graphics Cookbook, useful when I know exactly what I want but just forgot the syntax
• Institute for Digital Research and Education (UCLA)
• GLMM for Ecologists and Evolutionary Biologists