Hi,

I'm very confused about R structures and the methods to go with them. I'm
using R for microarray analysis with Bioconductors. Suppose without reading
the documentations, what's the best way to explore a data structure when you
know nothing about it?

I am currently using is() / class() to see what the object is. str() /
attributes() to probe inside the object, and something@something$something
to walk it and explore. Is there any other way? Also, without reading
documentations, is there a way to know what functions are available to
extract data from it? For example, there is sampleNames() which works on
ExpressionSet and AnnotatedDataFrame (which is a part of ExpressionSet). How
do I know they are available (as sometimes I can't recall where I've seen
them and I forgot the function names). And what are R functions? Are those
two separate functions or polymorphic functions? I'm also pretty confused
about S3, S4, or the regular list. I guess I'm fairly confused about R in
general.

Any good source of reading (hopefully short and understandable, too) would
be appreciated. Thanks.

Timothy

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