[R] Wikis etc.

[Michael Dewey]

At 16:06 09/01/06, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:

[snip various earlier posts]


>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.

But that is the solution to a different problem.
Reading the source for merge tells you how R merges two dataframes, the 
beginning user wants to know how to link together the information s/he has 
in two files but does not know what the name of the relevant command is, or 
indeed whether it is even possible.

To give you some idea of how ignorant some of us are it was only quite 
recently that I realised (despite several years reading free documentation, 
books on R and R-help) that if I type cor at the prompt what I see looks 
like source code but is not _the_ source code.


Michael Dewey
http://www.aghmed.fsnet.co.uk