[R] R Documentation(s)

Ko-Kang Wang Ko-Kang at xtra.co.nz
Wed May 3 13:15:32 CEST 2000


Kjetil Kjernsmo wrote:

> 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.
>

I agree.  Here is the my university we have a course on R, but it is just used for
number crunching mainly.  I have written pieces and pieces of R targetted on
beginners in some fields, such as economics, econometrics, mathematics..etc.  I
may, at some point, put them together.

>
> 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.
>

What exactly do you mean?  Do you mean R should be GUI (Graphical User Interface)?
I personally think it is GUI enough

>
> 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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--
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 Ko-Kang Wang
 Undergraduate Student
 Computer Science/Statistics Double Major
 University of Auckland
 Auckland 1005
 New Zealand
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