[R] Very new - beginners questions

[John Kane]

Hi Richard,

No specific answers for your data questions but for
learning R there are any number of resources.

There are links to references for books and a large
number of on-line materials on the R website.  Have a
look at the list on the bottom left of the screen for
"books" and "other" which leads to "contributed
documentation". 

 Books by Dalgaard, Verzani and Crawley all get good
reviews. 

In the contributed documents area "Using R for Data
Analysis and Graphics - Introduction, Examples and
Commentary”  by John Maindonald  and "Kickstarting R"
by Jim Lemon are both very useful.

I have also found that while An Introduction to R is
invaluable it is best to download it and keep it as a
pdf or a hard copy.  Also it is better as a 'second
intro' after you have looked at some of the books or
other supporting documentation.

Don't forget to browse the FAQs.  They answer some of
the more vexing questions about R very well.

(Oh if you want to move a graph from R to Word in
Windows just right click on the graph and copy it.)
--- Richard Price <freerichard at btinternet.com> wrote:

> Dear all,
>    
>   
> I have 4 sites and want to determine how different
> they are from each other. For this I have decided to
> use R though it seems a bit daunting to learn.
>   I have read data in from a CSV the structure is :
>    
>    Species1 Species2 Species3
>   
> Site1 4 4  7  
> Site2 3 1  0
> Site3 0 99  6
> Site4 75 3  33
>   
> There are many more species than shown above this is
> just an example. Here are the questions.
>    
>   How do I read one row of data so as to load site2
> into a variable called site2?
>   
> Once I plot a graph using ordiplot how do I extract
> it from R so that I can put it into a Word for
> Windows document?
>    
>   Once I have the data in varables I hope to use
> designdist and Sørensen to discover diversity
> indices. I had a crack at this once but because I
> had sites as the columns it didn't work. Now that I
> think I have the data correct I can proceed.
>    
>   x Input data (this will be the whole data set that
> I read into my variable 'allSites' from a CSV.)?
>   
> The variables for Sørensen will contain terms J for
> shared quantity, A and B for totals, N for the
> number of rows (sites) and P for the number of
> columns (species) and 'Binary' as the term.
>    
>   How do I get the shared number of species for each
> row?
>    
>   Probably very beginner type questions but I want
> to get on an haven't yet found the answers in my
> trawl throgh the help. Is there a book that I can
> buy to learn R?
>    
>   All the best,
> Richard Price
> MSc student University Birmingham.
> 
> 
> 
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
> 
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