[R] two questions for R beginners

Keo Ormsby keo.ormsby2 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 2 03:55:41 CET 2010


Liviu Andronic escribió:
> On 3/1/10, Keo Ormsby <keo.ormsby2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>>  Perhaps my biggest problem was that I couldn't (and still haven't) seen
>> *absolute beginners* documents.
>>     
> Perhaps http://www.r-tutor.com/? Also recently a webinar on R [2] was
> held and it hosts complete course notes and recordings. Otherwise,
> there was once a link posted on r-sig-teaching that would probably fit
> your needs, but I cannot find it now.
> [2] http://www.fort.usgs.gov/brdscience/learnR.htm
[..snip..]

> Maybe Rcmdr could help here? It allows performing entry level
> statistical analyses, while displaying the complete syntax.
> Liviu
>   
Yes, thanks. I will check the webinars.
In the beginning I did bump in to Rcmdr, but since it was a *package* 
that had to be downloaded from *CRAN*, and during installation it asked 
for a whole lot of options that at the time I had no idea what was meant 
by all that. help() always gives a description which is very useful if 
you know what you want to do, but words like *Generic function*, or the 
ellipsis (...) *further arguments to be passed to other functions*,  can 
be daunting to the uninitiated.  What I wanted to convey is that if you 
start from your own non-programmer non-statistician area, and try to go 
directly into R, you will quickly find yourself immerse in a lot of 
terminology and usability logic that is kind of alien to even proficient 
users of web browsers and Office suites. Of course there is a lot of 
information out there, many of it very simple indeed, but perhaps what I 
was looking for then was not an "R for dummies", but an "R for LAZY 
dummies".

By the way, what I meant by the 6 months, was to completely be R 
dependent, to not even consider using another software.

Thanks for the links!
Best,
Keo.



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