[R] help on R programming.

[Murad Nayal]

Hello all,

I am looking for books to help me gain a firmer grasp on the S/R
programming language ,  programing / data structures etc. it seems that
for this purpose two books are typically recommended: 

Programming with Data: A Guide to the S Language, John M. Chambers and
S Programming by Venables & Ripley.

- The Chambers book is published 1998. is it a bit dated at this point.
- is the Venables and Ripley's book a good source on the design and
manipulation of data structures in R (it seems mostly focused on R
extensions).
- are there any other books, possibly published more recently, that you
could recommend.


I also have a couple of particular programming questions:

-coming from a C++/java programming background I found that I often end
up in R with lists of objects (each constructed, in turn, as a list, say
list(x=x,y=y,z=z)). often, these individual objects have recursive
'attributes' so a matrix representation of this set of objects is not an
option. although a data.frame might be. I typically need to access
certain attributes of these objects for plotting or analysis etc.
however, I have not been able to come up with a clean way to do this?
e.g.

object.list = list(o1=list(x=1,y=2,z=3), o2=list(x=11,y=22,z=33))

what I would like to do is say get a vector of x values for the objects
in object.list, but something like
object.list[[1:length(object.list)]]$x, for example, returns NULL.

is there a better way to set up such an object list data structure that
will allow me to do this?

- what is the correct way to -remove- a component from a list. this
seems to do the trick: list[[1]] = NULL, however, you'd think this
should simply attach a NULL object at the first component position?  

many thanks for any help

-- 
Murad Nayal M.D. Ph.D.
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University
630 West 168th Street. New York, NY 10032
Tel: 212-305-6884	Fax: 212-305-6926