[R] R Documentation(s)

[Kjetil Kjernsmo]

On Tue, 2 May 2000, Emmanuel Paradis wrote:

>To me, the greatest issue is the audience targeted by a documentation. Many
>specialists are potentially interested by R, from the top-statisticians to
>the users who hardly knows about statistics but need to run some tests (at
>least to publish their results). It seems to me that some queries on the
>list have more to do with "using statistics" than with "using R". As long
>as non-statisticians use R (like me), this seems inevitable.

I just occured to me that something that would probably boost the number
of users, is a compendium on "How to do the things one usually does in a
beginners statistics course for non-statisticians". Many are introduced to
statistical software in such a course, and I can imagine many will never
use any other software than they were introduced to in the course. 
Such a compendium might catch new users and their instructors at the very
start. 

Here at my university, the standard package has been MINITAB. I have had
one single session of MINITAB myself, and it appeared to me as an endless
quest for the right dropdown menu point or dialog-box point. I switched to
S-plus, and to R after learning about it the week after. The reason I
mention this is the seemingly irrational urge many have to have drop-down
menus, even though the path to what you need is considerably longer than
just typing. If the compendium is able to show that the things you need
are not at all far away, and much more logical than drop-down menus, I
think many will be drawn towards R.

Best,

Kjetil
-- 
Kjetil Kjernsmo
Graduate astronomy-student                    Problems worthy of attack
University of Oslo, Norway            Prove their worth by hitting back
E-mail: kjetikj at astro.uio.no                                - Piet Hein
Homepage <URL:http://www.astro.uio.no/~kjetikj/>
Webmaster at skepsis.no 



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