Finding Help

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 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, and the document 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
  • 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
  • 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 for posing and answering questions about R, including the general R-help email list, the R-devel list for R code development, and R-package-devel list for developers of CRAN packages.