-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 0
/
Copy pathhelp.Rmd
23 lines (18 loc) · 2.73 KB
/
help.Rmd
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
---
title: "**Finding Help**\n"
---
There are a large number of resources are available to help with almost all coding issues, whether they are specific to R or more general. The first strategy once you feel stuck is to use Google (or an alternative search engine) to using a well thought out search term. You can also look into the [Main R FAQ](https://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html) page for answers to more language specific questions. Another strategy that should not be ignored is to ask your experienced colleagues, but remember not to become a pest.
# Online help forums
If you cannot find a pre-existing answer to your issue, you can create a question to ask online. In order to ask a question effectively, it helps to phrase the question clearly, and, if you’re trying to solve a problem, to include a small, self-contained, reproducible example of the problem that others can execute. You will often find that this process alone answers the question. For information on how to ask questions, see, e.g., the [R mailing list posting guide](https://www.r-project.org/posting-guide.html), and the [document](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5963269/how-to-make-a-great-r-reproducible-example) about how to create reproducible examples for R on Stack Overflow. Once you have a well formatted question there are a number of possible forums available see below:
- [Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/)
- A well organized and formatted site for help and discussions about programming (in any language).
- It has a huge community and a large number of answers with a good level of searchability
- Members of the community can be somewhat harsh to novices, especially if they perceive a question to have an obvious answer. For this reason it pays to put a good level of effort into creating a well thought out question.
- This harshness to novices is being clamped down on and in general the community is becoming more friendly and welcoming
- [The Statistical Computing with R subreddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/rstats/)
- A specialised subreddit interested in R
- The community is very welcoming especially to novices.
- Due to its smaller, more novice focused, user base complex questions may take longer to be answered than on Stack Overflow
- Searchability is not great
# R email lists
The R Project maintains a number of subscription-based [email lists](https://www.r-project.org/mail.html) for posing and answering questions about R, including the general [R-help](https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help) email list, the [R-devel](https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel) list for R code development, and [R-package-devel](https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel) list for developers of CRAN packages.