[R] Getting started with R

[Jay Pfaffman]

I've got a background in computer science & have been using Linux for
nearly a decade.  I'm working on a Ph.D. in education and technology
and I essentially live in emacs and do all of my writing in LaTeX.
To me R seems like the perfect stats package.  Unfortunately, the
learning curve is killing me.  I feel like that if I'd waded through
pulling down menus in SPSS or SAS I could have gotten a bit more done
by now, but I don't want to use those programs.

What I'd like is a cookbook of a few basic procedures.  I think I'm
more interested in the R code than I am statistical explication,
though I don't object to the latter.  Is Venables and Ripley "MASS"
going to do that for me or would "S Programming" be more appropriate?
In my cursory look through the sample chapter from Nolan and Speed I
saw no S-plus/S/R code whatsoever.

One thing I'm trying to do right now is certainly trivial, but I can't
quite get it going.  Hopefully I'm not sounding too much like I'm
asking you to do my homework.

In a perception study, I've got three within-subject conditions, A, B,
and C.  Each condition has 4 trials with 2 times and an angle
(actually an error measurement between the actual angle and the one
the subjects pointed to).  All I want is to get the stuff that
summary() gives split out by condition.  It might also be nice to
split it out between subjects as well to look at, and possibly correct
for individual differences, (which might be difficult with so few
trials?).  My data columns are as follows:

A B C (with 0 or 1 to indicate condition, would a single column with
1-3 be better?)

t1, t2, angle-error

Surely fewer than 10 lines of R could yield me these results and maybe
a couple pretty graphs.

In another study where I'm looking at motivation and hobbies, which I
have almost no idea how to analyze (which suggests I might have chosen
a bad design & that a problem like this probably doesn't belong in my
"cookbook") I've had people rank a set of 25 characteristics of their
activities or motivations (5 in each of 5 categories) and would like
to see if any patterns are emerging there.  My data start out as an
ordered list of these cards (1-25); I futzed in a spreadsheet to get
two columns, the motivation number and its rank.  If I could avoid
using the spreadsheet, that'd be nice.  

Thanks.

-- 
Jay Pfaffman                           pfaffman at relaxpc.com
+1-415-821-7507 (H)                    +1-415-810-2238 (M)
http://relax.ltc.vanderbilt.edu/~pfaffman/
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