On Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:31:19 +0000 Patrick Burns <pbu...@pburns.seanet.com> wrote: > * What were your biggest misconceptions or > stumbling blocks to getting up and running > with R?
I didn't have any major stumbling blocks, but even after years of using R I didn't have a clear concept of what exactly a vector, a list and a data frame was, and what was the difference and similarities between them (and stuff like why does x[i] return a different result than x[[i]]). Some things that have tripped my up is reassigning the value of T or F and getting very strange results afterwards (I now use only TRUE and FALSE). FAQ 7.31 and 7.22 have also been troublesome at times, especially 7.31 when used in 'for' loops. Also I found it quite confusing that ?ifelse works, but not ?if (you have to type ?"if") Also, why ?plot didn't give me the information I was looking for but ?plot.default did was rather confusing. I still experience similar problems with other functions. Usually 'methods' help, but some packages use S4 methods, which makes finding the correct help package quite challenging at times. > * What documents helped you the most in this > initial phase? In the initial phase I found the Rtips "http://pj.freefaculty.org/R/Rtips.html"; extremely useful. For understanding the difference between the various data types in R, Phil Spector's wonderful book 'Data Manipulation with R' was a great help. When reading it I finally understood things I have been wondering about for years. It really like the book. It's short, crystal clear and immensely useful. Another very useful document of a more advanced nature is the R Inferno. Best read after you've been using R for some time, though. I'm over the initial phase now, but two resources which continue to be of great help is http://www.rseek.org/ (mainly for searching the mailing list) and the 'sos' package (for finding the functions and packages I need). 'sos' really is great. There have been other packages/functions trying to do the same thing, but they have been to time-consuming and difficult to use (and learn), typically requiring you to first do a search, and then do some advanced subsetting to get useful results. This is similar to older search engines requiring many boolean terms to give the needed search results. With 'sos' I just choose some simple search terms describing what I'm looking for, and immediately get relevant results. 'sos' really is the Google of the R world. It has made a great impact on the discoverability of the various R functions and packages. Lastly, the 'demo' function is seldom mentioned, and easy to overlook, but gives a nice (and sometimes impressive) overview of what type of graphics is possible to create with a given packages. I wish more packages would have well-written demos. Also, I think some of the examples from the 'example' sections of help pages for functions could very well be copied to the demo of the corresponding package, e.g. a few of the examples of the 'xyplot' function in 'lattice'. -- Karl Ove Hufthammer ______________________________________________ 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.
