Programming questions for beginners
Programming questions for beginners
I'm currently working on learning r programming to use at work. Is there a good place whereI can ask for answers to the issues I'm running into that I cannot find by just searching online.
Agree on stack overflow. And part of learning how to program is trying to structure logic into thoughtful questions.
With R specifically I’d recommend looking into the tidyverse library for R. Or at least understand the libraries your work environment will be specifying to make sure you’re on the same page.
Ask ChatGPT. It won’t always be correct, but is patient with a new learner, so to speak. You can ask it to explain in more detail, or “is there another way to do that?” and get a different perspective on a solution.
We use chat gpt at work a lot. Why write a ton of basic code when chat gpt will do it for you 90% error free. Then just tweak a few things and your set.
Plus that asking “can I do X” and it saying no, but you can do it some other way is a huge time saver.
Thanks for the suggestion. I have been playing around with ChatGPT for a day now. This is a incredible tool. I also realised that a lot of the stuff I was trying to figure out can just be outsourced now.
One more vote for ChatGPT. I use it all the time to get me pointed in the right direction, or to start fleshing out an algorithm. It’s a great starting place.
stack overflow has a lot of R knowledge, in questions already asked and in an active community. Try looking if your question has been asked there before, and if not, ask it. Many beginner questions are not about a particular language but about logic and math, maybe you can give a look at math.stackexchange also. For more simple questions, language models are very good (Chatgpt/bing, Bard)
Well most replies already suggested a LLM but good old fashioned search skills work fine too.
For simple questions, as long as you know the correct terminology that is relevant, just asking the question of a search engine is usually good enough to turn up articles or stack overflow answers that'll help
If you don't know the terminology or you struggle to ask a precise question despite your knowledge, going up one level , so to speak, and consuming more information about the stuff in the immediate context, can often either fill in the gaps to allow you to ask the right question, or sometimes it's the missing bit of info you didn't know you needed to solve your actual problem.
Definitely use the other resources mentioned here, but Codeium is a really powerful AI chat/pair programmer that I’ve been using for about a year now and it has been extremely accurate in explaining code and giving answers. If you get stuck with learning something or want examples, I would definitely consider using it. It’s a VSCode extension, so you’ll have to have VSCode to use it.
Hi OP I am an R dev.
Once you have some basics, try to use the built in documentation by typing ?fun where fun is the function you are trying to use. The examples are extra useful.
This is a great resource: https://r4ds.had.co.nz/
It may not help you search for things if you don't know the correct terminology, but it is definitely helpful walking through examples of common data and visualization needs. Great to skin through for basic concepts and then keep handy as a reference.
Other that that, stack overflow for sure.