Getting help

There are various ways to seek help on R.

If you are searching for help on a specific function that is in a package loaded into your namespace:

?function_name

If you're not sure what package it belongs to:

??function_name

This will search across all installed packages in your library and pop up several options

Another recent package that's really useful in this context is called Rdocumentation. It searches across all packages on CRAN even if you do not have it installed locally.

to install:

library("devtools"); 
install_github("Rdocumentation","jonathancornelissen");
library("Rdocumentation")
# then all ?function searches go through the web
# If you do load this package and want to remove it because of lack of internet, use
detach("Rdocumentation")

Seeking help from peers

Always share some example data to help others replicate your problem.

for example, the function dput() can help recreate R objects by simply pasting the output into another R terminal. Just dput a few rows for testing purposes.

e.g.

dput(head(iris))

structure(list(Sepal.Length = c(5.1, 4.9, 4.7, 4.6, 5, 5.4), 
    Sepal.Width = c(3.5, 3, 3.2, 3.1, 3.6, 3.9), Petal.Length = c(1.4, 
    1.4, 1.3, 1.5, 1.4, 1.7), Petal.Width = c(0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 
    0.2, 0.2, 0.4), Species = structure(c(1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 1L, 
    1L), .Label = c("setosa", "versicolor", "virginica"), class = "factor")), .Names = c("Sepal.Length", 
"Sepal.Width", "Petal.Length", "Petal.Width", "Species"), row.names = c(NA, 
6L), class = "data.frame")

Use the sessionInfo() function to share your current namespace and package versions. Super helpful for others to help debug your issues.

The knitr function stitch() automatically includes this information. Try it on any example R script.

stitch("my_script.R")

search StackOverflow

9 times out of 10, the answers you are seeking have already been answered on stack overflow. Search using the [r]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r

Other resources

CRAN task Views: http://cran.at.r-project.org/web/views