Skynet - an R love hate story - Part I

R. I have to admit that the first time I heard about it, I thought of something cool like we see in movies or in series. Something followed by a guy wearing a hooded sweater, typing in front of a computer while streams of code go through his dark screen.

I have to say that it didn’t take long get in touch with reality and to be presented with the crude truth of what statistical programming really was.

I had some experience with coding. Ok I had a tiny bit of experience with coding somewhere in the early 90’s, when BASIC and Visual BASIC were still something that only cool kids used to do. However, my experience with Linux, and shell, wasn’t near enough to prepare me for what I was about to endure for the next year.

I started by digging through heavy statistical books filled with the primordial mentions of R. Then came tidyverse and after scientific bliss. Probably not full scientific bliss but something quite close to it. What were a few lines of code soon became the foundations for a package, and a scientific paper, with a package submission to the Gods of CRAN (pat in the back).

But I’m not here for self congratulation as I do that as a “healthy” exercise on a daily basis together with my morning coffee. The goal of this post is to go through the challenges and some of the resources I have found since I’ve started coding about one year ago.

Part I - (Re)sources to avoid immediate insanity

Discovering statistics with R - Andy Field.

https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/discovering-statistics-using-r/book236067
This is my true and only R bible. Hail the great Andy Field, as he shall solve all of your R problems. Jokes aside, this book made me love R in a way I never thought I would love it. Like a puppy wrapped in silk with a velvet red bow. It’s cute but informative. Funny but scientific. Nothing I can say, would ever be enough to show how much I’m thankful to Andy to have written this book. So if you have it in your university library, just run and get it. If not, the somehow high price for this book is more than justifiable. Not just for its size and weight, but as well for its content.

Tidyverse R Package - Hadley Wickham

https://www.tidyverse.org
Another life saver. This was and still is another lifesaver. Hadley and his colleagues wrote this series of packages, now somehow integrated with R Studio, saved my life more than once, thanks to its beautiful, clean, easy to learn syntax. I know that some of the more traditional, code-loving programmers, still prefer to have 20000 lines of code than to use those packages, used by programming toddlers just like me. However, I prefer efficiency. Just like classical paintings, some things are quite nice to look at but that’s it. I would never spend the rest of my life painting nymphs or people contemplating dead stuff.

Stackoverflow

https://stackoverflow.com
This is a rather tricky one. I love it and it saved my life a couple of times. However, you will find those who can be I would say slightly more critical about what you are searching for. In general, the community is helpful, and some people do take the time to understand what is that you are trying to do and what is the source of your problems. So whenever the “more critically oriented” members of the community appear, try to be nice. Others might not like it.

I’ll continue with the not so creative process behind learning R, building a package, whilst keeping my mental sanity. Or at least part of it.