R help - Dec 2004 - Which FM should beginners R? A suggestion.

We've recently had a thread on beginners and FAQs and the like.
I decided that it might be a good idea to offer a short list of
on-line help pages that beginners should read.  Goals:
 - the list short be short (I think mine is too long)
 - many of the commonest questions should find answers there (fairish)
 - I should have found the pages helpful myself (no question about that)
 - it's a beginning R topic list, not a beginning statistics topic list
You can find my first draft at

    http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/ok/R-help.txt

I think something _like_ this would be a genuinely useful addition to the
R documentation.  If people send me suggestions for additions, removals,
restructuring, &c, I will try to collate them and improve this.

On 06-Dec-04 Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:
> We've recently had a thread on beginners and FAQs and the like.
> I decided that it might be a good idea to offer a short list of
> on-line help pages that beginners should read.  Goals:
>  - the list short be short (I think mine is too long)
>  - many of the commonest questions should find answers there (fairish)
>  - I should have found the pages helpful myself (no question about
> that)
>  - it's a beginning R topic list, not a beginning statistics topic list
> You can find my first draft at
> 
>     http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/ok/R-help.txt
> 
> I think something _like_ this would be a genuinely useful addition to
> the R documentation.  If people send me suggestions for additions,
> removals, restructuring, &c, I will try to collate them and improve
> this.
Excellent -- not just for its broad coverage of basics, but also
for the simple yet cogent organisation.

I don't think it's too long: As it stands (and it could probably
be somewhat extended) it gives a quick oversight of all the
basic resources for common use in R so that users who are
wondering "what's in R about ... " can have the list presented
to the eye in easily scanned format. And can also readily see
things they wouldn't have suspected but need to know (I've had
that experience already with your draft).

I'll try to think of suggestions, but on my experience so far
you're ahead of me already and likely to stay that way.

Thanks,
Ted.


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E-Mail: (Ted Harding) <Ted.Harding at nessie.mcc.ac.uk>
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Date: 06-Dec-04                                       Time: 10:40:15
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I've made one important change to
 http://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/staffpriv/ok/R-help.txt
and a couple of minor ones (notably qqplot).  The important one is
that I've split "elementary statistics" into "elementary
descriptive
statistics and tests" and "model fitting", with rather more in
the
model fitting category (but still not glm).  Should 'glm' be there?

Possibly the biggest gap is that there is nothing about time series.