[R] New-user support package - suggestions?

[Søren Højsgaard]

Dear Andrew,
 
I tend to agree with Uwe. 
 
A perhaps more useful approach for achieving your goal would be to create a video introduction to R. On http://www.learnvisualstudio.net/ you can find examples of such introductory videos for programming, for example in C#.
 
I've experimented a little myself with creating such videos for "getting started" with R, i.e. installing R, installing the Tinn-R editor, using the help facilities, finding things on CRAN. It is not as easy to do as I had thought... (If anyone is interested in the result, please drop me a line and I'll send you a link).. There are various relevant pieces of software around, for example camtasia (commercial) and camstudio (freeware)..
 
Such a set of videos could make it onto CRAN...
 
Best
Søren
 
 
 

________________________________

Fra: r-help-bounces at stat.math.ethz.ch på vegne af Uwe Ligges
Sendt: to 04-05-2006 09:13
Til: Andrew Robinson
Cc: R-Help Discussion
Emne: Re: [R] New-user support package - suggestions?



Andrew Robinson wrote:

> Dear Community,
>
> This is largely a repost with some new information.
>
> I'm interested in developing a package that could ease the
> command-line learning curve for new users.  It would provide more
> detailed syntax checking and commentary as feedback.  It would try to
> anticipate common new-user errors, and provide feedback to help
> correct them.

Re. "anticipate", see

install.packages("fortunes")
library("fortunes")
fortune("anticipate")


> As a trivial example, instead of
>
>
>>mean(c(1,2,NA))
>
> [1] NA
>
> we might have
>
>
>>mean(c(1,2,NA))
>
> [1] NA
> Warning: your data contains missing values.  If you wish to ignore
> these for the purposes of computing the mean, use the argument:
> "na.rm=TRUE".


Attention. If you give help like this, you will implicitly teach users
not to read the manuals but trust on R's warning/error messages and
suggestions.
Some students won't ask the question "why do my data contain NAs" but
will start using na.rm=TRUE, even if the error was in a prior step and
no NAs were expected at all.


> I'm interested in any thoughts that people have about this idea -
> what errors do you commonly see, and how can they be dealt with?
>
> I have funding for 6 weeks of programming support for this idea.  All
> suggestions are welcome.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Andrew


Your project sounds very ambitious. I anticipate you will be
disappointed after 6 weeks of "programming", because you won't have
achieved very much. I'd rather try to spend 6 weeks of time for some
more promising projects...

Just my first thoughts, just go on with your project if you are convinced.

Best,
Uwe Ligges

______________________________________________
R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list
https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html