Help, I don’t know how to do a certain thing in R
Go through the following steps in this order
- Google it
- Ask your colleauges / fellow students
- Have a look at this website / FAQs, and the scripts and books we link to
- If neither of this helps, go to “Places to get help from” below
Help, I have an error message that I can’t resolve
First recommendation: Google it! If that doesn’t help, keep on reading.
Understanding R error messages
If something goes wrong, R tries to tell you what the problem is. Read the error message and think about what the message could mean. Some help
Debugging
R has a debugger, although not a very good one. Still, you should give it a try
Reducing the problem to a minimal example
If that didn’t help, try to isolate your problem to produce a minimal example. See
For one thing, by doing this, you will often find the problem. And secondly, it this is not the case, you can go with your minimal example to someone else to get help.
Getting help
If you couldn’t resolve your problem, despite taking all steps above, you need to get help. You can do this by going to your supervisor, or posting a problem on the internet.
Be adviced that in either case, the people that you are asking for help are quite busy. They can expect that you have already done everything you could to resolve the proplem, and that you prepared the things that you can’t resolve in a way that makes them easy to give you help. Particularly on the internet, people can get very annoyed if you don’t present your problem in the form that is most easy for them to address, i.e. as a minimal example (see above). Read, for example, http://www.r-project.org/posting-guide.html
Apart from your supervisor, common places on the internet that provide R help are
- The big R mailing lists, see also the special interest groups
- Stackexchange
The R universe has several layers and it is sometimes difficult to understand, how to find help for a special layer. This link may help you: http://www.r-bloggers.com/21-r-navigation-tools/
Please don’t post your questions on facebook, researchgate and the like - those are commercial sites, but more importantly, they are not visible to the wider internet without being logged in, which is very annoying because other people can’t see or learn from the answer.