posted about 3 years ago
I agree with Dr Jekyll, I used R for just about everything in my biomedical PhD. It was not generally used in our department (they tend to use SPSS), but we had an introductory lecture from a postdoc in the department and I was hooked. I started with a very thin volume (just over 100 pages) called "Getting Started with R: An Introduction for Biologists" by Beckerman & Petchey, which I read from cover to cover, but thereafter my main resource was CRAN and Stack Exchange. I bought "The R Book" by Cawley and "Discovering Statistics Using R" by Field, Miles & Field, but hardly referred to them. I had to consolidate and manipulate data from over 100 spreadsheets, so R was a Godsend. The original data were never touched, thereby avoiding the risks of copy and paste type operations, they were simply loaded, manipulated, then exported to new CSV files. It's certainly a steep learning curve in the early stages, but well worth investing the time.