My biggest impediment, as a scientist without previous programming experience, is that the R help is not beginner-friendly. I think it is probably great for experienced programmers and for the people who helped to create the software, to help them remember what they did, but I think it is very difficult for a newcomer without a strong programming background to learn about a new function or to discover the name of a function that you are pretty sure should already exist. Maybe this wouldn’t matter for most programming languages, but as free statistics software R is obviously going to attract many scientists who want to get an analysis done and have varying levels of experience with programming.
I found it much easier to learn how to use Mathematica, using only the online help. With R I had to buy several books to get a handle on it, which is fine, but even the books that I have found to be most useful tend to be didactically lacking—either too cursory or mired in unexplained programming jargon. They are OK just not great. What I think would be very helpful is an introduction to programming using R, preferably a big thick college textbook that takes at least a semester to go through, which should be a prerequisite for going through the Introduction to R available on CRAN. Also to do any analysis on real data you have to use the apply family of functions to perform different functions by groups. A long introduction to these functions, with lots of comparisons and contrasts between them would be very helpful. A few random examples concerning the R help: In my version of R (2.7.0 on Windows XP) typing > ?+ doesn’t do anything, but then if you type in the next line + ?sum you get the “Arithmetic Operators” help page. If you had just typed > ?sum in the first place you get the “Sum of Vector Elements” help page. Most examples in the R help pages use way to many other functions to be useful to a beginner. If an example uses 10 other functions besides the one being described, chances are a beginner won’t know what one of them does, which can set off a chain of having to look up other irrelevant functions. Some function names in the base package are goofy, such as “rowsum” which is used to “compute column sums across rows”, not to be confused with “rowSums” which computes row sums. -- View this message in context: http://n4.nabble.com/two-questions-for-R-beginners-tp1569384p1571243.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
