[R] R Documentation(s)

[Emmanuel Paradis]

Dear all,

I am interested by the various messages sent to the r-help mailing list
these last few days about documentation on R. Yet, there are a lot of
issues actually open on this topic, and it is not clear to me what is the
"urgent need for documentation" on R.

R comes with the 'Introduction to R' by Venables et al. I recommend the
colleagues and students in my lab who are interested in R to read it.
Surely, this is not sufficient to use R efficiently, but I found using the
'Intro to R' with the on-line help (text and html) a good combination to
run analyses and write programs. But this could reflect the fact that I
still use R at a relatively low level; more experienced users may have a
different opinion.

I have produced myself a short introduction to R for the postgrad students
here (so it is in French), and understand that similar documents have been
produced elsewhere. Would it be useful to put something together?

To me, the greatest issue is the audience targeted by a documentation. Many
specialists are potentially interested by R, from the top-statisticians to
the users who hardly knows about statistics but need to run some tests (at
least to publish their results). It seems to me that some queries on the
list have more to do with "using statistics" than with "using R". As long
as non-statisticians use R (like me), this seems inevitable.

Another issue is about languages (human ones, not computer ones): is there
a need to translate R docs?

Finally, is it possible to set a system of documentation that is able to
track the development of the software? I am personnally impressed by the
pace of release of new versions of R.

These are just some quick thoughts.

Best wishes to all,

Emmanuel Paradis
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