R

Although it is not an introduction for a complete programming or data analysis beginner (but neither is this wiki...) there is probably no better source on the R language than Hadley Wickham's Advanced R development - available as both a wiki and a book (in 2014).

R is a bit of a different animal from Python (and also most other programming languages for that matter): the main reason is that although both are general purpose programming languages in themselves, R and its standard library was designed with the explicit aim of becoming an environment for statistical work. The natural result of this is that the Python community consists of many more general purpose programmers and libraries, wheres R has much more to give to data analysts out of the box. Personally I don't bother trying to choose one over the other but rather enjoy working with both - there is much to learn by getting things done in both Python and R.

Core packages not included in base R used for data work:

• devtools
• ggplot2
• plyr
• dplyr
• reshape2
• bigvis
• shiny
• ggvis

Useful people/companies/accounts to follow on Twitter:

• Hadley Wickham
• Joe Cheng
• Winston Chang
• RStudio
• Dirk Edebuettel
• Romain Francois