1.7 Getting help

Currently, there are three main venues to get help when you’re stuck and can’t figure out what’s causing the problem: RStudio Community, StackOverflow and the R-help mailing list. You can get fantastic help in each venue, but they do have their own cultures and expectations. It’s usually a good idea to spend a little time lurking, learning about community expectations, before you put up your first post.

Some good general advice:

  • Make sure you have the latest version of R and of the package (or packages) you are having problems with. It may be that your problem is the result of a recently fixed bug.

  • Spend some time creating a reproducible example, or reprex. This will help others help you, and often leads to a solution without asking others, because in the course of making the problem reproducible you often figure out the root cause. I highly recommend learning and using the reprex package.

If you are looking for specific help solving the exercises in this book, solutions from Malte Grosser and Henning Bumann are available at https://advanced-r-solutions.rbind.io.