R help - Jul 2004 - Chambers' Programming with Data?

I'm trying to read John Chambers (1998) Programming with Data 
(Springer), and I'm finding many functions (e.g., deparseText on p. 102 
or levelsIndex on p. 203) that seem not to be available on R 1.9.1;  
many of these are available in S-Plus 6.2, though often with limited 
documentation.  I have two questions about this: 

      1.  Does anyone have suggestions on which parts of this book 
should receive most attention and which parts might be skipped as (a) it 
is not used by the most important material later in the book, and (b) 
much of what is different from other convenient sources has not been 
implemented in R? 

      2.  Is there a package available that provides an R implementation 
of these functions?  If yes, how can I get it? 

      Thanks,
      Spencer Graves