
To me, as a biologist recycled to biostats, I have always worked with Excel and then SPSS and moving to R was difficult (and still is, since I am still learning).

Being a self-taught person, I learn R looking for examples in Google, which many times takes me to Rwiki or other. I sometimes post questions and most of the answers were helpful, but I have found that sometimes the answers have been too short or didn´t give enough hints as to how to follow, and that has stopped me from asking again in order not to annoy experts. I have not answered too many questions from newbies but I have tried to explain as much as I could. Sometimes I find it better not to answer rather than just answering a short vague answer. Please, examples, examples, examples!

I found most difficult the different data types, since I understand excel as a data frame with columns and rows, and that´s it. Then as someone has already commented, the class, mode and str functions helped a lot. But I think that to me, examples are the way to let people learn. 
>From that, I moved to use loops, and am still nervous when people suggest ussing *apply functions, I can´t get down to use them!. I find loops more logical, and can´t see the way of moving them to *apply.

Finally, I am not a Linux expert , and I cannot get round to install and organise a proper R directory and keep updated. I have once tried to use a package that needed the development R version and was only prepared for Linux R, but couldn´t keep the R-devel versions updated. Some more step-by-step would help sometimes.

Thanks for a great tool!




> Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 12:44:23 -0600
> From: keo.ormsby2@gmail.com
> To: landronimirc@gmail.com
> CC: r-help@r-project.org; pburns@pburns.seanet.com
> Subject: Re: [R] two questions for R beginners
> 
> Liviu Andronic escribió:
> > On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 11:49 PM, Liviu Andronic <landronimirc@gmail.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> On 3/1/10, Keo Ormsby <keo.ormsby2@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>     
> >>>  Perhaps my biggest problem was that I couldn't (and still haven't) seen
> >>> *absolute beginners* documents.
> >>>
> >>>       
> >> there was once a link posted on r-sig-teaching that would probably fit
> >> your needs, but I cannot find it now.
> >>
> >>     
> >
> > OK, I found it. Below is an excerpt of that r-sig-teaching e-mail.
> > Liviu
> >
> > On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Robert W. Hayden <hayden@mv.mv.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> I think such a website would be a real asset.  It would be most useful
> >> if it either were restricted to intro. stats. OR organized so that
> >> materials for real beginners were easy to extract from all the
> >> materials for programmers and Ph.D. statisticians.  As a relative
> >> beginner myself, I find the usual resources useless.  In self defense,
> >> I created materials for my own beginning students:
> >>
> >>  http://courses.statistics.com/software/R/Rhome.htm
> >>     
> Hi Liviu,
> This is indeed the best site for introduction I have seen. Although it 
> still assumes some things that at first might seem unintuitive to the 
> absolute beginner I talk about. For instance, in the first page, it 
> shows that you can do sqrt(x), where x can be a vector, and return a 
> vector of the square roots of each number. Although this is high school 
> matrix algebra, most users expect that the input to square root function 
> to be a single number, not a matrix, as in Excel or a calculator. Other 
> concepts that are not explicitly introduced are "R workspace", the use 
> of arguments in functions (with or without the "="), etc. Others are 
> things like  diff(range(rainfall)) , where you have the output of one 
> function used as the input to another, all in the same command line. All 
> these things seem very basic, but can be difficult if you are trying to 
> learn on your own with no prior experience in programming.
> I hope I am not sounding too difficult and contrarian, I am just trying 
> to share my experience with starting with R, and in trying to convey 
> this learning to my colleagues and students. In the end, I did find 
> everything I needed to learn, and now I feel at ease with R, and I 
> believe that almost anybody that can use Excel or something like it, 
> could learn R.
> 
> Thank you for the information,
> Best wishes,
> Keo.
> 
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