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Comment by Calamitous | Hacker News Reader

So here's a hypothetical question: let's say you have a programmer who knows next to nothing about statistics, knows how to navigate around Excel fairly well, and once allowed himself to be scared away by R.

Let's further assume he's suddenly inherited a large volume of load testing data and a mandate to "make something out of it."

What's a starting point? I, I mean, he hears about the great visualization stuff in R and understands the importance of it but has no clue where to start.

Would HN have any advice for him?

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His book "Head First Data Analysis" seems a fairly gentle introduction to data analysis. I've read it and it's enough to learn a couple of tricks. Where to go from here it's harder to figure out. I'm refreshing my stats classes with the Pearson, and looking for a good introductory R book.

This stats course from Berkeley isn't bad, too: http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/classes/s133/schedule.html

Thanks :)

Since the person in question is a programmer: RTFM

I'd say R is much closer to how a software developer is used to work than a spreadsheet. But I understand that many people who have no practice in software development would rather choose a spreadsheet in such a situation.

Thank you, your response managed to be completely useless while being simultaneously condescending and making you look like an ass who is incapable of grasping a simple point; that I have no experience in statistics, but a great deal in programming, and don't know where to start.

Here, let me rephrase it monosyllabically so that you're capable of understanding the question:

Which "FM" would be good for me to "R"?

I assume you want to visualize the data but don't want to do any fancy statistics:

1. Tutorial

2. Language definition

3. Import/Export + sqldf or rodbc

4. Either Lattice[1] or ggplot2[2], and [3]

I'm glad I could be of help. :-)

[1] http://lmdvr.r-forge.r-project.org/figures/figures.html

[2] http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/

[3] http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/

Thank you for your unexpectedly calm and helpful response to my bad-mood snarkotron. :)

"An Introduction to R" could be a good place to start along with the other manuals: http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html (I think you can also access these through the help menu when interacting with R via the GUI.)

Also, to make nice looking plots, you might as well dive straight into Hadley Wickham's ggplot2 once you've gotten through the very basics: http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/

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