[R] New-user support package - suggestions?

[Frank E Harrell Jr]

Søren Højsgaard wrote:
> 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

But please choose an editor that works on all platforms.

Frank

>  
>  
>  
> 
> ________________________________
> 
> 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
> 
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-- 
Frank E Harrell Jr   Professor and Chair           School of Medicine
                      Department of Biostatistics   Vanderbilt University