[R-sig-teaching] purpose of list

Liviu Andronic landronimirc at gmail.com
Tue Jun 30 15:18:40 CEST 2009


Dear Robert,

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 1:32 PM, Robert W. Hayden<hayden at mv.mv.com> wrote:
> questions.  How are people using R for educational purposes?  What do
> people think of the various GUI or alternate (e.g., spreadsheet)
> interfaces?  Is there anything that makes R as easy to use for
> beginners as, say, Minitab?  What about using R for educational
>
I am not sure that this is a proper answer to your e-mail, but I will
mention a recent discussion [1] on r-sig-gui that would---I
believe---also be interesting to this list. It is about Deducer [2], a
new R-GUI built on top of JGR [3], intended to be in some respects
similar to SPSS or Minitab.

Personally, as a student and a self-taught novice in R, I believe that
JGR and Rcmdr are individually (and combined) most helpful to
beginners in grasping the basics of R, of course apart from the
introductory web sites [4] and beginner-friendly documentation. There
is also playwith [5] for graphics manipulation. I'd be keen to add
Deducer on the list, when the project matures.
Departing from the "doing statistics" objective, LyX [6] is most
helpful in writing Sweave reports without the additional burden of
(properly) learning LaTeX.
One important note is that all the mentioned applications are
cross-platform, and relatively easy to install.

Best regards,
Liviu

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/r-sig-gui@stat.math.ethz.ch/msg00465.html
[2] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Deducer/index.html
[3] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/JGR/index.html
[4] http://www.statmethods.net/
[5] http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/playwith/index.html
[6] http://www.lyx.org/




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