R help - Jul 2004 - dumpClass, hasSlot in R?

Venables and Ripley (2000) R Programming (Springer, sec. 5.1) and 
Chambers (1998) Programming with Data (Springer) describe functions such 
as dumpClass and hasSlot that I can not find in R 1.9.1 for Windows nor 
in the "R site search".  What do people use for similar functionality?
Also, what resources have people found useful for learning about S4 
classes, other than these 2 references? 

      Thanks, Spencer Graves

There are a few notes about difference between the R implementation
and the book at http://developer.r-project.org/methodsPackage.html

I found the hardest thing to get to grips in R was method calling -
using multiple dispatch (totally different to what I'm used to from
Java, Python etc.).  I found this tutorial
(http://www.gwydiondylan.org/gdref/tutorial.html, the sections on
generic functions and multiple-dispatch) very useful.  However, it is
for another programming language, and although the method and class
creation process feels very similar to R, the syntax is quite
different.  There is definitely scope for a similarly structured
introduction to S4 classes in R.

Hadley