Claudia Beleites wrote:
ManInMoon wrote:
Hi,
A number of people have suggested "I read the manuals"...
Could someone help me by telling me where the primary start point is
please?
In R, type
help.start ()
this should open a browser window with links to
- the packages
- the manuals
- a search engine
Please note: this is written in section 1.7 "Getting help with functions
and features" of Introduction to R
In the same section, you learn about
help.search
Note also:
? help
leads you to the man page describing the help system. In section "see
also" you find a list of other useful commands to find help
If you look them up and look a again what alternatives they suggest and
actually try them out (again with topic "help") you will come across all
informations about finding help on R topics that is written in this email.
- There also exists apropos ().
- In addition, e.g. reading this mailing list, you learn about the sos
package.
- You can also use the internet resources: on r-project.org -> manuals
- I personally use a lot:
http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/namazu.cgi (which is where
RSiteSearch () gets you). You can nicely decide where to search:
documentation of R and CRAN packages, and/or the mailing list archives.
Homework try out & read the results of:
RSiteSearch ("help")
For example, I am interested in writing functions with variable number of
arguments - where should I start to look?
"An introduction to R" only show a brief example - with no pointer to
where
to find further data.
I can't do ?xxx from R console in most cases - as I don't know what the
function name is that I am looking for!!!
Then do
??xxx
or
???xxx (needs sos)
or
RSiteSearch ("xxx")
or
apropos ("xxx")
...
which you could have found out by reading
? help
People have helped me find "substitute" to get some metadata out - BUT
how
could I have found that without guidance from nice people in Nabble?
Any help on this very much appreciated.
Sometimes it _is_ difficult to find the correct search terms.
However, I think that people in this list will appreciate if you
- show that you did search before asking, and also tell then with which
terms you did the search
- particularly for questions about the meaning of commands:
Try them out!
Put the command into pieces and look what each piece does
- people will appreciate if you ask what the correct search terms are
for your problem (as opposed to ask them doing your "homework")
Learning R is learning a language. Including vocabulary (i.e. terms
for the different concepts).
Asking for help with searching is like asking "How do you say in R for
concept xyz?" instead of "Could anyone do the translation I got as
homework?"
HTH,
Claudia
This is all great advice for you "ManInMoon." One additional comment.
When you have read the help page and don't understand something. You
will get far better answers here to explain what you have tried and what
you don't understand. Failure to do that makes it appear that you are
too lazy to be bothered to try and solve your problems. I'm not saying
you are, it's how it appears (hence my terse reply the other day).
Also, at the bottom of every r-help email is a link to the "Posting
Guide." Following the instructions there, for example, creating a toy
example that illustrates your problem is often very useful in helping
you solve the problem without posting a question.
I hope this helps.
--
Kevin E. Thorpe
Biostatistician/Trialist, Knowledge Translation Program
Assistant Professor, Dalla Lana School of Public Health
University of Toronto
email: kevin.tho...@utoronto.ca Tel: 416.864.5776 Fax: 416.864.3016
______________________________________________
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PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
