[R] mailing list for basic questions - preliminary sum up

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

My experience in several mailing lists and newsgroups has been that
"help" from other beginners very often deserves the scare quotes.
The advice is often extremely bad.

The situation for R is quite different:  R has the best documentation I've
ever seen for any open-source package, and it's better than most commercial
software I've had to deal with.  The R web site has pointers to some really
excellent stuff.  For example, while "S Poetry" is about S rather than R,
a lot of "programming" questions about R have clear explanations in that
book.  There are several tutorials, and the ones I looked at were good.

There are a few things about using R with a particular operating system
or window manager that are best shown in person.  But apart from that,
I'm wondering what kind of beginner questions there might be that beginners
would be able to help with that aren't already in the tutorials &c.

A beginner who can say "I have read <this>, <that>, and <the other> and
tried the on-line help, and I didn't recognise the answer to <my problem>"
is likely to get prompt and accurate help in this mailing list.

The books I've relied on for actually doing statistics have mainly been
"Statistical Models in S" and "Modern Applied Statistics with S", and again,
they really do answer a lot of questions.

Hmm.  I seem to have argued myself into the position that
IF the rule in the beginner list were that anyone purporting to
   answer a question should justify the answer by citing the relevant
   R documentation or one of the commonly mentioned books about S and R,
THEN it could be as educational for the answerer as for the questioner
   and quite helpful after all.