[R] two questions for R beginners

[GlenB]

Lazy and impatient? That's me! 

I find it hard to say what my biggest misconceptions were.

Here's one thing:

What I realized very early on:

 - many data analysis functions return a bunch of stuff, not all of which
you see when you print() it

what I *failed* to realize:

- The bunch of stuff such functions return is just a *list* 

that has follow-on implications:

- even if you're just doing some simple analysis like a linear regression,
if you want to be able to see/get all the information, you really need to
learn how to examine what's in a list and how to operate on the list.

I had seen lists as "potentially useful but not something I need to worry
about right now, since I'm having enough trouble just grokking why
dataframes look different to matrices", whereas I needed to know that lists
were absolutely central to what I was trying to achieve.

While I have no doubt this information can be found in a dozen places, I
read a bunch of introductory documents at the time, and I don't recall it
being stated explicitly like that in any of the places I looked. It made a
big difference to me when I realized that so many functions just return a
list. I mean, it's obvious, and I should have seen that's all it was the
first time, but I didn't.

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