[R] R Documentation(s)

[Douglas Bates]

Kjetil Kjernsmo <kjetil.kjernsmo at astro.uio.no> writes:
> On Tue, 2 May 2000, Emmanuel Paradis wrote:
> 
> >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.
> 
> I just occured to me that something that would probably boost the number
> of users, is a compendium on "How to do the things one usually does in a
> beginners statistics course for non-statisticians". Many are introduced to
> statistical software in such a course, and I can imagine many will never
> use any other software than they were introduced to in the course. 
> Such a compendium might catch new users and their instructors at the very
> start. 
> 
> Here at my university, the standard package has been MINITAB. I have had
> one single session of MINITAB myself, and it appeared to me as an endless
> quest for the right dropdown menu point or dialog-box point. I switched to
> S-plus, and to R after learning about it the week after. The reason I
> mention this is the seemingly irrational urge many have to have drop-down
> menus, even though the path to what you need is considerably longer than
> just typing. If the compendium is able to show that the things you need
> are not at all far away, and much more logical than drop-down menus, I
> think many will be drawn towards R.

Perhaps it is not exactly a "compendium" in the sense you describe but
there is an R package called Devore5 containing all the data sets
for a specific introductory statistics text, Jay Devore's "Probability
and Statistics for Engineering and the Sciences (5th ed)".  Because
there are facilities for documenting data sets in R and because you
can use
 example(topic)
to run the example section from a manual page as a script in R, I can
document all the examples in the text and show the R code that
corresponds to the example.

This approach is tied to the specific text but, for someone who has
access to that text, it provides a ready answer to questions like "How
do I do a two-sample paired t-test in R?".  They go to the appropriate
section of the text, see that Example 9.8 does such a test, and then
run
 library(Devore5)
 example(xmp09.08)
to see the commands and resulting output.

It is interesting that it is extremely difficult to package these
kinds of demonstrations for students when using a GUI-based system
like Minitab.  I had previously used Minitab in the course where I use
this text and I found that I either explained the command-line
interface or I did an in-class demonstration with the GUI or I was
spending my time describing things like "you click on the Statistics
menu and that gives you an option of Analysis of Variance (or maybe it
is called ANOVA, I can't remember) and that brings up a panel where
...".  Those kinds of explanations are very hard to follow.  

With the command line interface in R I can put up a transparency and
show the class "type this and you get that".

-- 
Douglas Bates                            bates at stat.wisc.edu
Statistics Department                    608/262-2598
University of Wisconsin - Madison        http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~bates/
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html
Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe"
(in the "body", not the subject !)  To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch
_._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._