[R] Fortune candidate! Re: new to R Project

[spencerg]

       I have a concern with the sentiment expressed:  When one is new 
to a language, it is often not easy to know where to start in the 
available documentation.  It's hard to RTFM when one does not know which 
FM2R.


       I currently subscribe to email help for three other open source 
collaborative projects.  This started with a problem I have not been 
able to solve.  I reviewed options I could find, including posting a 
question to R-help.  After careful study, I selected one alternative and 
tried it.  When I hit a roadblock with that, I tried another.  When that 
failed, I tried their help mailing lists.  So far, I have installed 
three different software packages and gotten them to do simple things.  
My current status reflects the famous line from Thomas Edison:  I know 
several things that don't work.  I've been forced to postpone further 
work on that project indefinitely.


       Was the question obvious?  The post included, "my goal is using R 
i have to connect to the database and i have to generate reports."  We 
can quibble with the lack of clarity in the prose;  for many people in 
Germany (the poster had a German email address), English is a second 
language.  (Gott sei dank dass ich nicht so oft meine Fragen auf Deutsch 
stellen muss.)


       It looks to me like the questioner wants to access a standard 
database system like MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle.  As far as I know, 
that's not trivial.  Moreover, it's not easy even to find relevant 
documentation.  S-Plus and more recently R have been part of my life not 
quite every day for the past seventeen years.  For most of that period, 
I avoided databases, because I believed the learning curve would be 
steep, and it seemed like one more thing that could distract me from the 
most important things I had to do.  Not quite a year ago, I had to work 
with a database system.  I learned to use RBloomberg, RODBC, etc., 
enough to do what seemed to be required.  However, at least for me, it 
was not easy to decide where to start.


       Best Wishes,
       Spencer Graves


On 2/22/2010 5:25 AM, Detlef Steuer wrote:
> One vote goes to Dave's answer!
>
> You made (saved) my day
> detlef
>
>
> On Mon, 22 Feb 2010 13:07:23 +0000
> "Dr. David Kirkby"<david.kirkby at onetel.net>  wrote:
>
>    
>> chinna wrote:
>>      
>>> hi everyone,
>>> i am new to R project can anyone please help me by providing documents....
>>>
>>> my goal is using R i have to connect to the database and i have to generate
>>> reports.
>>>
>>> Thanks in advance
>>> chinna.
>>>        
>> R is a complex program. If you can't work out how to find the documentation, I
>> doubt you will be able to use R.
>>
>> Dave
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-help at r-project.org  mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
>> PLEASE do read the posting guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>>      
> ______________________________________________
> R-help at r-project.org  mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
> PLEASE do read the posting guidehttp://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>
>    


-- 
Spencer Graves, PE, PhD
President and Chief Operating Officer
Structure Inspection and Monitoring, Inc.
751 Emerson Ct.
San José, CA 95126
ph:  408-655-4567