[R] two questions for R beginners

[Saeed Abu Nimeh]

Pat,
Off the bat, beginners and advanced. In addition, splitting by domain
would be very helpful -- something along the lines of:
http://cran.r-project.org/web/views/. But we should be careful, we do
not want to create 20 other mailing lists :) We have to group things.
This will help splitting the volume of the list and will help in
targeting lists by expertise.
Thanks,
Saeed

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 2:08 AM, Patrick Burns <pburns at pburns.seanet.com> wrote:
> Saeed,
>
> If the R-help list were split, what do you
> see as the pieces?
>
> Pat
>
> On 26/02/2010 01:53, Saeed Abu Nimeh wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 9:31 AM, Patrick Burns<pburns at pburns.seanet.com>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> * What were your biggest misconceptions or
>>> stumbling blocks to getting up and running
>>> with R?
>>
>> 1- Compared to other programming languages it is hard to learn R by
>> example, because it is hard to find code on the web that will do the
>> exact thing you are looking for, sometimes you might get lucky though.
>> By contrast, take Perl for example, it is an easy language to learn by
>> example.
>>
>> 2- The R mailing list. Beginners get frustrated after they struggle
>> for a long time to solve a problem and the easiest thing then is to
>> send an email to the R mailing list. I did this in the past. The best
>> thing that happened was that my request was neglected and I had to
>> spend more time on the problem and find a solution by myself
>> eventually. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying that the mailing list
>> is bad, but it should be more organized. Maybe broken down into couple
>> of other mailing lists. This might bring up a good discussion thread.
>>
>>>
>>> * What documents helped you the most in this
>>> initial phase?
>>
>> An Introduction to R by Venables
>> simpleR – Using R for Introductory Statistics by Verzani
>>
>
> --
> Patrick Burns
> pburns at pburns.seanet.com
> http://www.burns-stat.com
> (home of 'The R Inferno' and 'A Guide for the Unwilling S User')
>