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

[Philippe Grosjean]

Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
> 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)

Hum, hum... you mean, something like: 
http://wiki.r-project.org/rwiki/doku.php?id=tips:tips

:-)

PhG


> 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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>>
> 
>