R help - Jun 2008 - R web site-Useability & finding varous bits of documentation

I was starting to write a note to a prospective R-user and came to the point of
explaining how to get useful introductory information on R.

After mentioning the Into and the FAQs I went on to try to explain how to use a
lot of the contributed information.

However I realised that there seems to be no direct way to get to Other
Publications or Contributed Documenation.

The best I have seen is to get to Books and then click on  "other
publications" which take one to "Publications related to R" or go
to "other" (main page)  and then click on "Contributed
Documentation"
which takes one to "Contributed Documentation"  This seems less than
optimal.

Am I missing some more direct ways to get to "Publications related to
R" and "Contributed Documentation"?  I remember blundering around
the site for some time (days in elapsed time?) before I managed to find these
documents.

If I am  not we may be losing a lot of potential users who just cannot find
basic documentation.  The Intro and the FAQs are invaluable but not exactly the
best way for a complete noivice to get started.

>>>>> "JK" == John Kane <jrkrideau at yahoo.ca>
>>>>>     on Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:50:18 -0700 (PDT) writes:
    JK> I was starting to write a note to a prospective R-user
    JK> and came to the point of explaining how to get useful
    JK> introductory information on R.  After mentioning the
    JK> Into and the FAQs I went on to try to explain how to use
    JK> a lot of the contributed information.

    JK> However I realised that there seems to be no direct way
    JK> to get to Other Publications or Contributed
    JK> Documenation.

    JK> The best I have seen is to get to Books and then click
    JK> on "other publications" which take one to
"Publications
    JK> related to R" or go to "other" (main page) and then
    JK> click on "Contributed Documentation" which takes one to
    JK> "Contributed Documentation" This seems less than  optimal.

that depends ...

    JK> Am I missing some more direct ways to get to
    JK> "Publications related to R" and "Contributed
    JK> Documentation"?  I remember blundering around the site
    JK> for some time (days in elapsed time?) before I managed
    JK> to find these documents.

    JK> If I am not we may be losing a lot of potential users
    JK> who just cannot find basic documentation.  The Intro and
    JK> the FAQs are invaluable 

Well, the first entry in the 'Documentation' section of the
sidebar is 'Manuals' (which is considerably more than "The Intro
and the FAQs"), and these are really the only documentation part 
which the R core team strives to keep up-to-date.

Every R-project page reader should realize these are the
official docs.
If you open it, you already get a page with a link to
contributed docs.
Alternatively, there's the last item of the 'Documentation' section
of the
sidebar, called "Other"  which does mention the "Contributed
Doc.." section  >>> on CRAN <<<

Note that the R-project page (www.r-project.org)  
and  CRAN  are two "things",  albeit closely related.
CRAN is for "DOWNLOAD"ing, including free contributed docs.
So that is the main reason, "contrib.docs" are not there in the
www.r-project.org sidebar.

    JK> but not exactly the best way for a complete noivice to get started.

Well, I actually would want the complete novice to take note that
there is much official documentation, before (s)he delves into one of
the contributed docs.

Martin Maechler,  ETH Zurich (and part of R-core)

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008, John Kane wrote:
> I was starting to write a note to a prospective R-user and came to the
point of explaining how to get useful introductory information on R.
>
> After mentioning the Into and the FAQs I went on to try to explain how to
use a lot of the contributed information.
>
> However I realised that there seems to be no direct way to get to Other
Publications or Contributed Documenation.
>
> The best I have seen is to get to Books and then click on  "other
publications" which take one to "Publications related to R" or go
to "other" (main page)  and then click on "Contributed
Documentation"
> which takes one to "Contributed Documentation"  This seems less
than optimal.
>
> Am I missing some more direct ways to get to "Publications related to
R"
> and "Contributed Documentation"?  I remember blundering around
the site
> for some time (days in elapsed time?) before I managed to find these 
> documents.
Look at the page source for

 	http://www.r-project.org/navbar.html

or

 	http://cran.r-project.org/navbar.html

and you will see the href URLs.

Or if you use Firefox, right click on the link, select 'copy link 
location', and paste the result into your explanation or paste it into 
your location window and then bookmark it.

HTH,

Chuck



>
> If I am  not we may be losing a lot of potential users who just cannot find
basic documentation.  The Intro and the FAQs are invaluable but not exactly the
best way for a complete noivice to get started.
>
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at 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.
>
Charles C. Berry                            (858) 534-2098
                                             Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
E mailto:cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu	            UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901

> Note that the R-project page (www.r-project.org)
> and  CRAN  are two "things",  albeit closely related.
> CRAN is for "DOWNLOAD"ing, including free contributed docs.
> So that is the main reason, "contrib.docs" are not there in the
> www.r-project.org sidebar.
Why does there need to be two sites?

Hadley


-- 
http://had.co.nz/

hadley wickham <h.wickham <at> gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Note that the R-project page (www.r-project.org)
> > and  CRAN  are two "things",  albeit closely related.
> > CRAN is for "DOWNLOAD"ing, including free contributed docs.
> > So that is the main reason, "contrib.docs" are not there in 
>> the  www.r-project.org sidebar.
> 
> Why does there need to be two sites?
> 
I agree. I never  understood this division, and it adds a lot of 
confusion because parts are repeated.

Dieter

Dear UseRs!

I am really amazed by lattice capabilities but one thing is really beyond  
my understanding.
I would like to have conditional plots with points inside each panel  
colored by groups "gr1" and "pched" by "gr2":

xyplot(A~B|C,myD,col=gr1,pch=gr2) #this makes sense for me

But this does not work, because
"col","pch","lty","fill" etc. are passed
directly to panel function and not subscripted by conditional variable C.  
The result is that the same truncated vectors col,pch,lty are used for all  
panels.

I know I can write something like this to overcome the problem:

xyplot(A~B|C,myD,col=gr1,pch=gr2,
        panel=function(x,y,...,subscripts,col,pch){
		 panel.xyplot(x,y,col=col[subscripts],pch=pch[subscripts]
	)
)
but is so clumsy :(.

Isn't it possible to have   panel.XUZ(x,y,...,col=col[subscritps],...) or  
something like that? And dispense whith "groups" variable whatsoever?

Sorry if I missed something.

Many thanks,
Vitalie.