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R for the Rest of Us

Learn to use the most powerful tool for working with data.
Even if you've never coded before.

Supporting forward looking organizations

Core Courses

New to R?

From "what's R?" to "I love R" in three self-paced courses.
Start here when you're just starting out.

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R in 3 Months

R in 3 Months

Looking for even more? R in 3 Months is a cohort-based program to help you finally learn R.

High-Quality Instruction

With R in 3 Months, you’ll get high-quality instruction that will guide you from R newbie to R expert.

Personalized Feedback

You'll work on your own code every week and get in-depth feedback.

Supportive Community

You'll be on this journey alongside a supportive community that will help you learn and keep you accountable to yourself.

Testimonials

Don't Take it From Us

Our learners say it best.

At first, I thought R was only for stats-minded people and was outside of my wheelhouse as a person who deals more with data extraction, transformation and reporting. However, after going through the R for the Rest of Us courses and learning from David about the vast capabilities of R, I quickly discovered R IS EXACTLY for people like me! Its strength in creating efficient data processing and reporting workflows is beyond amazing, and David – with his deep knowledge and genuine desire to teach and build capacity – is the perfect R guide!

Michelle LaFleche
Michelle LaFleche Senior Data and Reporting Analyst, Michigan Fitness Foundation

As someone who has never coded before, this course was a lifesaver. Dr. Keyes takes you on an incredible journey as he follows a step-by-step approach to familiarise you with R and making it less intimidating to code. This course has encouraged me to continue learning R and hopefully, become proficient in it in the coming future.

Dhruv Aggarwal
Dhruv Aggarwal

I shared R for the Rest of Us with my daughter who is in college and trying to learn R, and she texted me an hour later..."OMG, this is 1000x better and easier to understand than the other videos I saw." Thank you David for making R so easy to understand!

Beeta Tahmassebi
Beeta Tahmassebi Vice President, EnCompass LLC

What made me decide to engage with R in 3 Months was the focus on accessibility and inclusivity. It promised to simplify the complexity of R and make it approachable for someone like me who didn't have a strong background in programming or statistics. Before the course, my use of R was quite limited and mostly experimental, and I was not fully comfortable with the language. However, after completing R in 3 Months, my confidence and competence in using R have significantly increased. Now I use R regularly for a variety of tasks, such as data manipulation, data wrangling, data cleaning, statistical analytics, and data visualization. This has allowed me to leverage R more effectively in my professional projects.

Jose Luis Villca Villegas
Jose Luis Villca Villegas Medical Researcher

I've been dipping my toes in the R water for many years, your site and approach has been the most accessible and useful by far!

Bohdanna Kinasevych
Bohdanna Kinasevych Leading4Impact

I had dabbled in R a number of years ago and needed to get a refresher of the basics before getting back into coding and data analysis using R. Getting Started With R was excellent as a refresher and would be just as good for those starting out. The videos are easy to follow and they provide practical examples to follow along. I would recommend to anyone looking to understand R

Nick King Risk Management

David and Charlie are incredibly knowledgeable about R and the course, while challenging, is engaging. The level of individualized coaching and feedback was extraordinary.

Catherine Roller White
Catherine Roller White CRW Consulting

Your succinct lessons were the gateway for my fast advancement. By learning the basics from this course, I have already gone down the deep end of conducting inferential statistics, machine learning, and other advanced analyses. I've already impressed my boss with my first HTML report to our VP!

Jordan Trachtenberg
Jordan Trachtenberg Director of Assessment at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

It was really great and helpful, thank you very much!

Johanna Lebeth

I've used R quite a bit in the past, but until taking this course, I felt like I was navigating a maze with my eyes closed -- running bits and pieces of code and troubleshooting each time I bumped into a wall, but never truly understanding where I'd been or where I was headed. "Getting Started with R" is the map to the maze that I never knew I needed, but now don't know how I'd live without! David clearly explains foundational concepts and makes R so much easier to understand. Whether you're brand-new to R or have been using it for years, I highly recommend this course.

Rachel Udow
Rachel Udow Data Specialist, Communities In Schools
Consulting

Let Us Handle the R

High-quality data visualization, workflow improvements, and custom packages to enable organizations to communicate more effectively and more efficiently.

Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model Reports

Judi’s House/JAG Institute, a nonprofit in Colorado, provides support regarding childhood bereavement. In 2018, they created the Childhood Bereavement Estimation Model® (CBEM) to estimate rates of children losing a parent or sibling before adulthood. Annual CBEM reports were produced, but racial and ethnic data breakdowns were lacking until 2021. Partnering with R for the Rest of Us, they generated high-quality, easy-to-understand reports on bereavement disparities by race and ethnicity. These national and state-level reports, created using parameterized reporting and RMarkdown, help advance their vision that no child should be alone in grief.

Immunization Agenda 2030 Reports

The World Health Organization's Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) aims to improve global vaccine access. To better report progress, the International Vaccine Access Center at Johns Hopkins University partnered with R for the Rest of Us in 2023. They produced 72 user-friendly country-level reports in English and French, using parameterized reporting. These reports highlight individual country progress, use less technical language than previous online scorecards, and are in a printable PDF format for review.

NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region R Training Website

Improving R Training for NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region

NOAA Fisheries West Coast region (NOAA WCR) aims to maintain healthy fish populations along the west coast, with offices in California, Oregon, and Washington. Recently, they have increased their use of R, arranging internal trainings and seeking additional support in 2024 from R for the Rest of Us. They created a 6-week training program focusing on R fundamentals, advanced R topics, and GitHub integration. By the end, NOAA WCR staff efficiently produced technical memoranda and improved their workflows using R and Quarto.
Blog

Blog

Learn to use the most powerful tool for working with data.
Even if you've never coded before.

How to make heatmaps in ggplot

May 1, 2025

Heatmaps are a common way of representing data. In this blog post, I'll show you how to make your own heatmaps using ggplot. In the process, you'll learn a bit about working with the {sf} package, specifically the st_make_grid() function to make a grid, the st_intersection() function to clip the boundaries of your geography to the grid you create, and st_join() to do spatial joins. This blog post is adapted from a lesson in the Mapping with R course . If you want to learn to make heatmaps...

Use shadows in ggplot to highlight findings

April 24, 2025

In our consulting work, we make a lot of the data visualization for parameterized reporting . It’s something I spoke about in my 2024 Cascadia R Conf talk, How to Make a Thousand Plots Look Good: Data Viz Tips for Parameterized Reporting . One example I gave in this talk came from our work with the Johns Hopkins International Vaccine Access Center and the World Health Organization . In this project, we made reports for the Immunization Agenda 2030 project, which tracks the progress countries...

Create your own custom {ggplot2} theme

April 3, 2025

Creating custom themes in {ggplot2} lets you elevate your data visualizations from standard to standout. Whether you’re aiming for a polished, brand-consistent look for your organization or a unique aesthetic that reflects your personal style, a custom theme function makes it easy to apply your design to all figures with a single line of code. In this tutorial, we’ll cover: the essentials of the powerful ggplot2::theme() function, including how to adjust fonts, colors, sizing, and spacing;...