Turning a group of programming newbies into R users

Andy Smith writes: In the Organismic and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Program at UMass Amherst a number of people use statistics everyday as part of our research. We needed a program that could perform numerous statistical analyses, incorporate user written functions and be constantly updated, whilst still being cost effective (aka free)! R offered us a way to do all this and more, however, now there was another problem, learning a programming language...

At the upcoming Pioneer Valley R Meet-Up he'll be talking about how a group of programming newcomers overcame the steep learning curve of the R language. Andy will discuss the techniques he used, the tips and tricks that helped, and the warning errors that took hours to resolve. There are also some fun examples that Andy will present to demonstrate how certain elements of the R language can be learnt, so feel free to bring a laptop!