Newbie R

It is generally accepted that R has one of the steepest learning curves of all the statisitical platforms (SAS, SPSS, etc.). For a person new to the R environment or someone trying to get the lay of the land there are many ways to start. There are some online tuturials and books, I used R in a Nutshell myself. However, more needs be done for developing basic skills of new R users. I had seen comments that a good IDE or GUI like  RStudio can flatten out the learning curve. Another option is going to a training class offered by many different companies. There are also the many local area R user groups.

The R User Meetups are a great place to get started with R. Sometimes the presentations at the R meetups are directed more at the accomplished user than the Newbie. The Greater Boston Area useRs group has come up with a great idea on how to help the newer members to the R community.

At every meeting Jeffery Breen has been doing an opening talk that is directed at the new R user.  So far he has done:

Reshaping Data in R
Grouping & Summarizing Data in R
R plus 15 minutes = Hadoop Cluster

These talks and others like them are a critical piece and an important contribution to building a large competent user base of any open source tools. I am hopeful that other groups will give more of these basic talks and post them so that the R community can build a large repository of presentations on how to do the basics in R.