[R-sig-Geo] SpatialPolygons decomposition...

[Peter S. Hayes]

Hi All,

I'm trying to teach a spatial analysis class using R as a means of 
learning some details... I'm not an expert in R myself, but am learning 
it while using it as a 'tool' for lessons in the class...

In getting the students familiar with some of the SP classes, we began 
looking at the class components and manipulating some of the components 
(such as translating by modifying coordinates..).

Is there a means of decomposing SpatialPolygons to access the list of 
Polygons and contained classes? The help files (for example, polygons()) 
appear to hint so, but not function so... the SpatialPolygons isn't 
quite a traditional R dataframe and won't flatten with a call to 
as.data.frame() to allow access to the individual slots... but there 
must be a means of doing that...

Also, I have "Applied Spatial Data Analysis with R" as one of the 
texts... any thoughts for more references... especially for 
non-programmers: I've some software experience (C/C++...) but most of 
the students are environmental study, environmental science, or biology 
students and this is one of their first experiences with anything having 
a command line. We've been taking things slow, but R is still a bit 
cryptic... any thoughts on that would be appreciated!

Thank you for all!


Pete