R help - May 2003 - ? building a database with a the great examples

Dear R help reader,

I'm not an expert in R and are lerning a lot by reading the help 
digest, which is sometimes difficult because the huge amount of data 
posted. I have posted some questions before, and  are impressed how 
quick I got a solution for my problem. Sometimes with quite different 
suggestions. I was always wondering if my questions didn't come up 
before. On the other site, it wasn't easy to search the help archive, 
purely I didn't know how to formulate my problem.
I'm wondering if we could not collect all the answers / examples in a 
database -
sorted in topics, like the help document "Rtips".
I have no clue if this is possible to do nor how time consuming the 
maintaining would be.

This is just my view how the help list could be improved

Yours
Frank
-- 
Frank Mattes, MD			e-mail:	f.mattes at ucl.ac.uk
Department of Virology			fax	0044(0)207 8302854
Royal Free Hospital and 			tel	0044(0)207 8302997
University College Medical School
London

On 05/28/03 20:09, Frank Mattes wrote:
On the other site, it wasn't easy to search the help archive,
>purely I didn't know how to formulate my problem.
>I'm wondering if we could not collect all the answers / examples in a 
>database -
>sorted in topics, like the help document "Rtips".
>I have no clue if this is possible to do nor how time consuming the 
>maintaining would be.
As the maintainer of one of the sites you might search, I do
think that this would be time consuming and also somewhat
redundant with the many textbooks and introductory documents that
are available.  Also, it isn't clear to me how you would search
the "tips" except by using the same sort of search terms that you
can use now.  (But if someone can think of a way to solve these
problems, I don't want to stop him or her from implementing this
idea!)

I find the htdig interface that I use fairly powerful.  You can
use phrases and logic (AND, OR, etc.).  Often a fairly general
search turns up something that gives me a hint about what search
terms I should have used.

-- 
Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Home page:            http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron
R page:               http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/

Perhaps you want to start maintaining Rtips itself!  

I don't have as much time for it as I used to.  I still think it is 
valuable to have such a listing, but it is so hard to keep up to date 
with R and I'm only doing minimal work to keep it up to date.  I'm 
thinking of dropping altogether the section on packages because I just 
can't keep up with the creativity of the R community.  I did most of 
that list before Frank Harrell put up Hmisc and Design, you know.

The Rtips page is still up here:

http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/R/statsRus.html

The FaqManager software is starting to show its age, but it still works. 
 If you want to be a contributor, I could assign for you a password on 
that server.  

Also, I think it will work if you go to this other name I have created 
for this same thing:

http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn/R/Rtips.html

Some users write and ask me why I did not contribute this doc to the R 
homepage, and I have no good answer except that in the beginning I did 
not have enough stuff to make it worthwhile.  Since the content of Rtips 
can change on a daily/weekly basis, it did not seem right to just make a 
snapshot and email it over. But I'm open to suggestions.

Frank Mattes wrote:
> Dear R help reader,
>
> I'm not an expert in R and are lerning a lot by reading the help 
> digest, which is sometimes difficult because the huge amount of data 
> posted. I have posted some questions before, and  are impressed how 
> quick I got a solution for my problem. Sometimes with quite different 
> suggestions. I was always wondering if my questions didn't come up 
> before. On the other site, it wasn't easy to search the help archive, 
> purely I didn't know how to formulate my problem.
> I'm wondering if we could not collect all the answers / examples in a 
> database -
> sorted in topics, like the help document "Rtips".
> I have no clue if this is possible to do nor how time consuming the 
> maintaining would be.
>
> This is just my view how the help list could be improved
>
> Yours
> Frank


-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: pauljohn at ukans.edu
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700