Some books and other forms of documentation on R

11th September 2021

The thrust of an exhortation from a computing handbook publisher comes to mind here: don’t just look things up on Google, read a book so you really understand what you are doing. Something like those words was used to sell an eBook on Github but the same sentiment applies to R or any other computing language. Using a search engine will get you going or add to existing knowledge but only a book or a training course will help to embed real competence.

In the case of R, there is a myriad of blogs out there that can be consulted as well as function and package documentation on RDocumentation or rrdr.io. For the former, R-bloggers or R Weekly can make good places to start while ones like Stats and R, Statistics Globe, STHDA, PSI’s VIS-SIG and anything from Posit (including their main blog as well as their AI one) can be worth consulting. Additionally, there is also RStudio Education and the NHS-R Community, which also have a Github repository together with a YouTube channel. Many packages have dedicated websites as well so there is no lack of documentation with all of these so here is a selection:

Tidyverse

forcats

tidyr

Distill for R Markdown

To come to the real subject of this post, R is unusual in that books that you can buy also have companions websites that contain the same content with the same structure. Whatever funds this approach (and some appear to be supported by RStudio itself by the looks of things), there certainly are a lot of books available freely online in HTML as you will see from the list below while a few do not have a print counterpart as far as I know:

Big Book of R

R Programming for Data Science

Hands-On Programming with R

Advanced R

Cookbook for R

R Graphics Cookbook

R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

R Markdown Cookbook

RMarkdown for Scientists

bookdown: Authoring Books and Technical Documents with R Markdown

blogdown: Creating Websites with R Markdown

pagedown: Create Paged HTML Documents for Printing from R Markdown

Dynamic Documents with R and knitr

Mastering Shiny

Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps

Outstanding User Interfaces with Shiny

R Packages

Mastering Spark with R

Happy Git and GitHub for the useR

JavaScript for R

HTTP Testing in R

Outstanding User Interfaces with Shiny

Engineering Production-Grade Shiny Apps

The Shiny AWS Book

Many of the above have counterparts published by O’Reilly or Chapman & Hall, to name the two publishers that I have found so far. Aside from sharing these with you, there is also the personal motivation of having the collection of links somewhere so I can close tabs in my Firefox session. There are other web articles open in other tabs that I need to retain and share but these will need to do for now and I hope that you find them as useful as I do.

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Technology Tales

Some books and other forms of documentation on R

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