Additional Resources

A Curated List for R Learners

A curated list of high-quality books, tutorials, and galleries to continue your R journey.

Online Books

R for Data Science (2e): The “bible” for modern data science in R by Hadley Wickham, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Garrett Grolemund. It covers the entire tidyverse from ggplot2 and dplyr to modeling.
The Epidemiologist R Handbook: An outstanding, practical guide for applied epidemiology. It covers everything from data cleaning and descriptive tables (gtsummary) to outbreak investigation.
Reproducible Medical Research with R: A concise guide focused on the specific needs of clinical and medical researchers.
Efficient R Programming: For when your R code starts to get slow. This book provides excellent tips on how to write faster, more efficient R code.
Introduction to Data Science: By Rafael Irizarry. A comprehensive book that covers the fundamentals of R programming, statistics, and machine learning.
Data Wrangling: A Stanford course page with excellent materials and case studies on the art of data wrangling.

Biostatistics for Biomedical Research: A complete, in-depth biostatistics course by Frank Harrell. A foundational resource for statistical methods in R.
Statistical Rethinking with R: A modern, Bayesian approach to statistics by Richard McElreath. Highly recommended for building a deep conceptual understanding of modeling.

Fundamentals of Data Visualization: A guide on why to choose certain charts. It teaches the “grammar” of data visualization, not just the code.
ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis: The official book for the ggplot2 package, written by its creator, Hadley Wickham.

Mastering Shiny: The definitive guide to building interactive web applications with R, written by the creators of Shiny.
JavaScript for R: For when you want to take your Shiny apps and visualizations to the next level by integrating custom JavaScript.

Quarto Website: The official documentation for Quarto, the next generation of R Markdown. This is the new standard for scientific communication in R.
R Markdown Cookbook: A complete book of tips, tricks, and “recipes” for solving common R Markdown problems, by Yihui Xie.
bookdown: Authoring Books: A package for writing books, dissertations, and long technical documents using R Markdown.
blogdown: Creating Websites: A package for building complete blogs and static websites using R Markdown.
Getting Started with Quarto: A fantastic 2-hour webinar by Tom Mock that will get you up and running with Quarto quickly.

The here Package: A small package that solves the problem of file paths and working directories. A “must-have” for all your RStudio Projects.
The rio Package: A package to make data import/export simple. One function, import(), handles almost any file type (.csv, .xlsx, .sav, etc.).

Swirl tutorials: An R package that teaches you R inside the R console with interactive, guided lessons. Perfect for day one.
Posit Primers: A series of short, interactive, web-based tutorials on key topics like dplyr, ggplot2, and Shiny.
ggplot2 tutorial by Cédric Scherer: An incredibly detailed and visually stunning tutorial for making beautiful plots in R.

Posit (formerly RStudio) Cheatsheets: The essential 2-page guides for dplyr, ggplot2, RStudio, R Markdown, and more. Pin these to your wall.

The R Graph Gallery: A massive, searchable library of almost every plot type you can imagine, with reproducible ggplot2 code.
From Data to Viz: A beautiful flowchart that helps you choose the right chart for your data, with R code examples.

Visual Vocabulary by FT: A guide to chart types and their best uses, from the Financial Times graphics team.
Interactive Chart Chooser: Another great tool to help you select the right chart for your communication goal.
chart.guide: A modern, in-depth guide to chart design and selection principles.

ggplot2 extensions: The official gallery of packages that extend ggplot2 for new geoms, themes, and capabilities.
esquisse add-in: An RStudio add-in that gives you a “drag-and-drop” interface for building ggplot2 plots.
ggstatsplot: Stats on Plots: The “gtsummary for plots.” This package creates ggplot2 charts with statistical details (like p-values) added directly to them.
gtsummary: Tables for Plots: While it’s for tables, it’s a key part of the EDA/viz workflow. It works beautifully alongside ggplot2 to present your data.

Posit Blog: The official blog from the makers of RStudio. The best place to find out about new packages and features.
Keyboard Shortcuts in the RStudio IDE: Learn these to dramatically speed up your coding. Ctrl+Enter and Ctrl+Shift+M (for |>) are just the beginning.