9.5 Concluding remarks

We hope the more indepth focus on programming and more advanced use of R in this tutorial has given you more insight into how these aspects of R work. Ultimately, the best way to become familiar and experienced with these methods is to repeatedly use them, often on your own data, to solve your own issues. Programming is a challenge for many people in any language - and it can be especially challenging for biologists. The key thing to keep in mind is that you are now familiar with the basics. You might still feel daunted at the prospect of sitting down and writing a function or set of code completely from scratch. However as you have seen from these tutorials and also those linked at the end of each section, there is a wealth of resources available online that can demystify many of these concepts further. The most important thing for your own future work is that you can grapple with these tutorials and then take things a step further each time. Even for experienced users, it takes time and thought to code in R - we hope that these tutorials have set you on the trajectory to becoming more advanced users!

Good luck!