aRrgh: a newcomer’s (angry) guide to R
▻http://tim-smith.us/arrgh/index.html
R is a shockingly dreadful language for an exceptionally useful data analysis environment. The more you learn about the R language, the worse it will feel. The development environment suffers from literally decades of accretion of stupid hacks from a community containing, to a first-order approximation, zero software engineers. R makes me want to kick things almost every time I use it.
But there are a lot of great tools that are built in R. ggplot2 is first-in-class and Bioconductor packages are often essential. Sometimes there’s aught to do but grin and bear (though never without a side of piss and moan).
The documentation is inanely bad. I can’t explain it. aRrgh is my attempt to explain the language to myself. aRrgh exists as a living document and will continue to grow — it is not complete, but it got to a point where it seemed like it was probably useful so I decided to toss it on the web.
