I agree. I have a foot of books on R now, for example the R Book by
Michael Crowly. But so far, Googling the archives of this list has been
the most help. Nonetheless, if I cannot understand the documentation of
a function, then the documentation needs to be updated. For example,
there needs to be a "Returns" section at the top of every function, so
one can see what type of thing the function returns.

Merge() needs to start with "To merge two dataframes (datasets)
horizontally, use the *merge* function." rather than

"Merge two data frames by common columns or row names, or do other
versions of database /join/ operations" which does not at all say that
it does a horizontal merge if one does not know SQL. I do know SQL, and
it is still not clear to me. And the/ merge/ documentation should then
refer users to/ rbind/ for vertical merges.

I hope that someone on the list can take actually change this file for
the benefit of others.

Thanks,
Jim


On 2/2/2010 2:00 PM, Erik Iverson wrote:

James Rome wrote:
> On 2/1/2010 5:51 PM, David Winsemius wrote:
> I figured this out finally. I really believe that the R help write-ups
> are sorely lacking. 

The help docs are probably not the best way to learn R, but they are
great for users of the functions.  I have found that after going through
an introduction book on R or online tutorial (plus experience), that the
help system in R is really, really good at *documenting the behavior of
the functions*, which is the point of them.

As another general hint from someone who has learned R slowly over time,
when something happens that you don't understand on "real" data,
construct a minimal example data.frame and try out your code on that.
Also, learning how to use browser() or the debug package has been very
useful.


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