The Tidynomicon

A Brief Introduction to R for Python Programmers

"Speak not to me of madness, you who count from zero."

Years ago, Patrick Burns wrote The R Inferno, a guide to R for those who think they are in hell. Upon first encountering the language after two decades of using Python, I thought Burns was an optimist---after all, hell has rules.

I have since realized that R does too, and that they are no more confusing or contradictory than those of other programming languages. They only appear so because R draws on a tradition unfamiliar to those of us raised with derivatives of C. Counting from one, copying data rather than modifying it, lazy evaluation: to quote the other bard, these are not mad, just differently sane.

Welcome, then, to a universe where the strange will become familiar, and everything familiar, strange. Welcome, thrice welcome, to R.

Setting Up

1. Create an account on rstudio.cloud, then create a new project and start typing.
2. Alternatively:
   1. Install R. We recommend that you do not use conda, Brew, or other platform-specific package managers to do this, as they sometimes only install part of what you need.
   2. Install RStudio.
   3. In the RStudio console, run install.packages("tidyverse") to install the tidyverse libraries. We will install others as we go along, but we're going to need this soon.

Please see BUILD.md for a description of how to rebuild this lesson and why it is designed the way it is.