[R] Wikis etc.

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 1/9/06, Thomas Lumley <tlumley at u.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 9 Jan 2006, Michael Dewey wrote:
> >
> > Further to that I feel that (perhaps because they do not like to blow their
> > own trumpet too much) the authors of books on R do not stress how much most
> > questioners could gain by buying and reading at least one of the many books
> > on R. When I started I found the free documents useful but I made most
> > progress when I bought MASS. I do realise that liking books is a bit last
> > millennium.
> >
>
> Very late last millenium, though.
> "When I were young[er] we didn't have all these fancy yellow books."
>
> More seriously, yes, reading books about R and S is very effective and is
> how most of the R experts learned.  In my case it was the Blue Book, the
> White Book, and the Ripley/Venables/Smith notes on S-plus (which have
> evolved to the Introduction to R).

In addition to books, the various manuals, contributed documents and
mailing list archives, all of which one should review,
the key thing to do if you want to really learn R is to read source code
and lots of it.  I think there is no other way.  Furthermore, the fact that
you can do this is really a key advantage of open source.