[R-wiki] Top level organization

[Gabor Grothendieck]

On 2/3/06, Ben Bolker <bolker at zoo.ufl.edu> wrote:
> Gabor Grothendieck wrote:
>
> >> [GG]
> >>A few comments:
> >>
> >>>- what is the difference among Manuals, Cookbooks and Tips and Tricks.
> >>>Its not clear to me.
> >>  [BB]
> >>   Manuals and "cookbooks" are longer and by a single or a few authors;
> >>tips and tricks are shorter and more collaborative (I've tried to
> >>clarify a little bit by adding a few short descriptions to
> >>"start2").  That said, I think the subdivision within "Guides"
> >
> > [GG]
> > This is still not clear..  There are THREE categories currently,
> > not two.  The three possible categories I can see are:
> >
> > - official R manuals.  The official manuals that come with R wifieid.
> > - other R documents.  Contributions from users.
> > - snippets.  Paul Johnson's collection, etc.
> >
> > Is that the distinction?  Should it be?
> >
>
> Are you looking at http://www.sciviews.org/_rgui/wiki/doku.php?id=start2
> ?   it has "Getting Started", "Guides", "Tips & Tricks", "R Packages",
> "R Documentation", "Links", "Miscellaneous".
>   I would say "R Documentation" = your category #1
>               "Guides" = your category #2
>               "Tips & Tricks" = your category #3
>
>   I like this set of categories and (for the most part) names for them.
>
>   I can imagine arguing some more about the proper name for Tips&Tricks
> (=  Snippets = Short examples & notes = Rtips and other stuff = Code
> library = Shorter material = ... ?); I can also imagine that "R
> Packages" needs some clarification (what's in here? notes on R packages?
> Wikified documentation -- or is that in "R Documentation", which claims
> to have help for all of CRAN and Bioconductor?)

Yes, I am looking at that link.  Reproducing part of it here:

Getting Started
Do you want to know what R is, or do you want to start using it? Get
started. I tried to make the section header into a link to
getting-started:getting-started, but DocuWiki didn't seem to
understand ...

What is R? – A short explanation and a few examples of R's potential
Case studies – People explain how and why they started to use R
R installation – All you need to know to install R and additional R packages
Reference cards – Brief overviews of tasks and associated commands
Translations – To and from other statistics packages and computer
languages provide link to foreign-language information?
FAQ – Beginners' Frequently Asked Questions

Guides
Longer documents introducing R, demonstrating particular kinds of
analyses, or describing how R is used in particular fields previous
link was to tutorials:tutorials. Was that right??

Demonstrations – Let you drive and look how R works
Tutorials – Let you drive, but do it yourself
Manuals – Textbooks, classical approach
    Statistics with R
Cookbooks – Textbooks, learn-by-example approach

Tips & Tricks
...

Now the last three are Manuals, Cookbooks and Tips and Tricks.
To me a cookbook is the same as tips and tricks.  For example
there are a number of O'Reilly published books called cookbooks
that are collections of snippets.

Thus we need to get rid of the cookbooks category.

Also what is Statistics with R?  Is that a statistics book that
happens to use R?  If so, that is not a manual and those
should not be listed under manuals or else manuals needs
to be a different word.  I am not sure what is intended here.