R help - Sep 2006 - FW: R Reference Card and other help (especially useful for Newbies)

Hi all: 

  
Newbies (and others!) may find useful the R Reference Card made available by

Tom Short of EPRI Solutions at http://www.rpad.org/Rpad/Rpad-refcard.pdf  or
through 
the "Contributed" link on CRAN (where some other reference cards are
also
linked). It categorizes and organizes a bunch of R's basic, most used 
functions so that they can be easily found. For example, paste() is under 
the "Strings" heading and expand.grid() is under "Data
Creation." For
newbies struggling to find the right R function as well as veterans who 
can't quite remember the function name, it's very handy. 

Also don't forget R's other Help facilties: 

help.search("keyword or phrase") to search the **installed** man pages

RSiteSearch("keyword or phrase") to search the CRAN website via
Jonathan
Baron's search engine. This can also be done directly from CRAN by following
the "search" link there.

And, occasionally, find()/apropos() to search the ** attached** packages for
functions using regexp's. 

Though R certainly can be intimidating, please **do** try these measures
first before posting questions to the list. And please **do** read the other
basic R reference materials. Better and faster answers can often be found
this way.

  
-- Bert Gunter 
Genentech Non-Clinical Statistics 
South San Francisco, CA 
  
"The business of the statistician is to catalyze the scientific learning 
process."  - George E. P. Box

New users may also want to look at SciViews R Graphical User Interface(GUI). It
can be a good learning tool. Its text based editor is basic compared to WinEdt
with the R editing plug-in, or ESS and (X)Emacs combination. But it has
point-and-click menus that help in writing code, and easy view of objects, etc
can be very helpful for new users. Using this GUI may require you to install
some R packages listed on the SciViews page.

http://www.sciviews.org/SciViews-R/

Anupam.

Anupam Tyagi <AnupTyagi <at> yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> New users may also want to look at SciViews R Graphical User
Interface(GUI). It
> can be a good learning tool. Its text based editor is basic compared to
WinEdt
> with the R editing plug-in, or ESS and (X)Emacs combination. But it has
> point-and-click menus that help in writing code, and easy view of objects,
etc
> can be very helpful for new users. Using this GUI may require you to
install
> some R packages listed on the SciViews page.
> 
> http://www.sciviews.org/SciViews-R/
A user may need to change the file target SciViews shortcuts points to. These
are added to Windows Start menu. This is needed for SciViews to work with the
intalled R version.

Use start menu to go to menu item SciViews-R. Go to "R Console". Right
click. Go
to last item in the list called "properties". You will find something
like the
following in the "Target field"

"C:\Program Files\R\R-2.2.0\bin\Rgui.exe" --sdi LANGUAGE=en
RSciViews.RData

note the C:....\R-2.2.0\...

It assumes that you have R-2.2.0 installaed in:

C:\Program Files\R\R-2.2.0

If your R installation is R-2.2.1, and is installed in

C:\Program Files\R\R-2.2.1

then you need to change the "target" of SciViews-R "R
console" shortcut to:

"C:\Program Files\R\R-2.2.1\bin\Rgui.exe" --sdi LANGUAGE=en
RSciViews.RData

note the change to: C:....\R-2-2.1\...

note the "LANGUAGE=en" for English language GUI. You may be able to
change this
to a language you want to use with R. See documentation for SciViews