[R-wiki] Gelman's comments about R tips vs Wiki

[Gabor Grothendieck]

In thinking about this some more perhaps one possibliity would be to have
an index which incluldes the answer.  That would allow one to browse the
key code and also see an expanded wiki discussion.

e.g.

1.1 Bring raw numbers into R: scan(myfile)
1.2 Basic notation on data access: iris[1,2]
1.3 Exchange data between R and Excel/other progs: read.xls(excelfile)
 [also robdc, foreign and Hmisc packages]
1.4 Merge data frames: merge(ds1, ds1, by = c("city", "x1"),all=TRUE)


On 4/23/06, Gabor Grothendieck <ggrothendieck at gmail.com> wrote:
> Each tip should be one (or a small number of lines) for the description
> and one line (or a small number of lines) for the answer -- not pages.
> Look at Paul Johnson's original organization and its quite clear its
> superior for both browsing and searching.
>
> On 4/23/06, Gavin Simpson <gavin.simpson at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-04-23 at 05:57 -0400, Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> > > On 4/23/06, Philippe Grosjean <phgrosjean at sciviews.org> wrote:
> > > > Tony Plate wrote:
> > > >  > [...] (see hereunder for full post)
> > > >  > However, maybe this can be partially addressed by having larger index
> > > >  > pages, each one pointing to many different small example pages. [...]
> > > >
> > > > Exactly! Speaking about "browsing" the tips, the key is not to have all
> > > > tips on one page, but an i
> ndex, table of content, summary, or
> > > > whatever-you-call-it page. You browse that page and click on the links
> > > > you want. This is more effective than browsing tens of thousands of
> > > > lines to discover that the tips you are looking for is the forelast one,
> > > > that is, the 9,999th one!
> > > >
> > >
> > > You want to browse the code itself, not just an index.  The way
> > > you learn R is to look at a lot of code and not by having to waste
> > > time jumping to dozens or hundreds of different pages.
> >
> > Gabor
> >
> > /you/ might learn R best that way, but I doubt many people will. From my
> > own experience and from teaching R to colleagues and with students on
> > short courses is that they like a reasonable grounding in the basics to
> > allow them to get started, and then when they started doing their own
> > thing they want to ask "how do I do x?" Scanning a list of tips allows
> > them to drill down to the few items that sound like they might answer
> > their question. People don't want to read page after page of code -
> > especially on a screen - just to find the one sentence or line of code
> > that will help them solve their immediate problem.
> >
> > G
> >
> > >
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