[R] R code for "Statistical Models in S" ?

[Charilaos Skiadas]

I just acquired a copy of "Statistical Models in S", I guess most  
commonly known as the "white book", and realized to my dismay that  
most of the code is not directly executable in R, and I was wondering  
if there was a source discussing the things that are different and  
what the new ways of calling things are.

For instance, the first obstacle was the solder.balance data set. I  
found a "solder" data set in rpart, which is very close to it except  
for the fact that the Panel variable is not a factor, but that's  
easily fixed.
The first problem is the next two calls, on pages 2 and 3. One is  
"plot(solder.balance)", which is supposed to produce a very different  
plot than it does in R (I actually don't know the name of the plot,  
which is part of the problem I guess). Then one is supposed to call  
"plot.factor(skips ~ Opening + Mask)", which I took to mean:
"plot(skips ~ Opening + Mask, data=solder)", and that worked, though  
I still haven't been able to make a direct call to plot.factor work  
(I keep getting a "could not find function plot.factor" error).

Anyway, just wondered whether there is some page somewhere that  
discusses these little differences here and there, as I am sure there  
will be a number of other problems such as these along the way.

Haris Skiadas
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
Hanover College