[angdis]

There is a weirdness to R. I found that taking a lot of time to focus on the basics helps.

If you're committed to using R, read John Chamber's book and also look for answers on the old "R mailing list" (a place so mean, it makes stackoverflow look like mister roger's neighborhood).

[baldfat]

Working in the Hadley Wickham's Universe with dplyr ggplot2/ggvis and stringr really helps a ton.

[angdis]

Absolutely, and don't forget tidyr! Its hard to overstate Mr Wickham's contribution to making R a very handy and useful tool. I am sure that a lot of folks would have tried R and then moved on to something else were it not for the "Hadley-verse".

[baldfat]

It is the simple Functional language we want when working with data.