Getting help

Slides

Objectives

  • Know your options for finding help

  • Understand how to create a minimal reproducible example to get better help

Live coding/discussion: options for finding help

  • --help flag
  • man pages
  • ? in R
  • Package websites (found with google or through CRAN page)
    • These often are the same material as help files + vignettes, but easier to read and examples are rendered on web
  • StackOverflow
    • People aren’t always the friendliest, but making a reprex helps you get good answers
  • Minimal reproducible examples with reprex
    • Demo RStudio addin
  • ChatGPT
    • Not recommended for beginners!
    • Sometimes (~50% by some estimates) gives the wrong answer, difficult to spot mistakes if you’re a beginner

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{scott2023,
  author = {Scott, Eric and Diaz, Renata and Guo, Jessica and Riemer,
    Kristina},
  title = {Getting Help},
  date = {2023},
  url = {https://cct-datascience.github.io/repro-data-sci//lessons/11-getting-help/notes.html},
  doi = {10.5281/zenodo.8411612},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Scott, Eric, Renata Diaz, Jessica Guo, and Kristina Riemer. 2023. “Getting Help.” Reproducibility & Data Science in R. 2023. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8411612.