[R] Novice User Manual

[Ko-Kang Kevin Wang]

1. Are you talking about installing or actually running/using R?  If you want to learn how to install it, you can find it in the second volumn of R news, the article written by Prof. Brian Ripley.  The R-news can be downloaded from CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2001-2.pdf).  If you want to know how to use it, then the syntax/usage is not very different (in fact almost the same) as in every platform.  Take a look at An Introduction to R (http://cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.pdf).

2. Read An Introduction to R - see above

3. Again, see above.  But basically if you have a dataset which has many columns (i.e. in tabular form), and it is saved as a text file (which can be done using Save As... in any spreadsheet program), and you want to load into R, you can do something like:
   myData <- read.table( file.choose(), header = T )
where on the press of ENTER key, a chooser will pop up and you can find your file and select it and click OK.  Your dataset is now load into R, under the name myData.  You will also want:
   attach( myData )
so that you can use the column names directly in R.  

If you have a vector of data (e.g. 100 numbers), then you can/should use scan().  So:
   myVector <- scan( file.choose() )
and follow the similar procedure.  You do not need to attach it as it is a single vector which you will be using myVector to manipulate it within the R session.  

There are ways to specify the file's path, but this is a bit more complicated for beginner and file.choose() will do the job anyways.

4. Again check An Introduction to R first.  Or "Using R for Data Analysis and Graphics" by John Maindonald (http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/usingR.pdf).  I'm currently writting some PowerPoint slides on this too.

5. An Introduction to R has some explanations on this.  Again, I'm currently writting some PowerPoint slides on this too.

6. What kind of computation?

7. I'm not sure about this one.

Do check out CRAN's contributed manuals too.  There are some excellent guides, such as ``R for Beginners / R pour les debutants'' by Emmanuel Paradis (http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Rdebuts_en.pdf)... and others.  John Verzani posted up his site a few days ago which also has lots of excellent tutorials and examples (http://www.math.csi.cuny.edu/Statistics/R/simpleR).

Hope this helps,

Ko-Kang Wang

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ko-Kang Kevin Wang
Statistical Analysis Division Leader
Software Developers' Klub (SDK)
University of Auckland
New Zealand

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
[mailto:owner-r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch]On Behalf Of wildscop
Sent: Friday, August 31, 2001 5:59 AM
To: R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch; r-help at stat.math.ethz.ch
Subject: [R] Novice User Manual


Dear R users,

         I'm a new user of R : in fact , i hadn't used R yet. To say the 
truth , I'm used to with graphical interface of windows environment. so R 
console reminds me Linux , of which i am afraid of much more. Whatever , i 
like to learn about the 7 topics below of "R" or "S+4.5" [is there any 
other similar program like these ?]. Thats why i need some documentation 
[preferably at PDF file formate]. Can you please provide me web link 
addresses where can i find documentation about the topics below :
         1. running R or S-plus in windows environment
         2. Vectors and Matrices
         3. Reading and Sorting data and listing data
         4. Plotting and graphics
         5. Functions
         6. Programming for Statistical computation
         7. Estimation of the parameters of different models using 
Newton-Raphson method
         it would be a great help if i can get effective and nicely written 
tutorials to learn it quickly. I also need to know if i need any packages 
to learn about the topics above which is not included at R-1.3.0 or S+4.5 
by default. I look forward to you for your valuable suggestions about "R" 
or "S+" about any thing that you want to suggest.

NB: where should i mail  : R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch or 
at  r-help at lists.R-project.org to reach R-help ? since i'm not sure about 
it : i mail at both addresses. Forgive me if it is cross-posted.


Best regards,


_______________________
Mohammad Ehsanul karim
Email : isrtdu at yahoo.com
Voice : 880 - 02 - 9870390
[7-10 PM at GMT +06:00 ]
_______________________

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