[R] Another NEWBIE

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 18 Jun 2004, F.Kalder wrote:

> I'm a very fresh newbie to R.

First piece of advice: read the posting guide before posting, and in 
particular use a meaningful subject line.

> My first main question is, what the limitations of R are, what methods can R
> NOT do, esp. compared to (a) SPSS and (b) SAS? 

R is a full-featured programming language, with no such limitations.

> The second question is, how do you handle the data entry, data management
> and data manipulation in R, to me it seems to be really complicated and
> confusing?! Are there a kind of "helping tools"?

There is documentation.  For example, chapter 2 of MASS (see the FAQ or 
the posting guide) is devoted to this, and R ships with a `Data 
Import/Manual'.  We don't know your background or skill level, but the FAQ 
points you to lots of documentation.

> The third question: are there differences in linux and windows versions of
> R? At the monemt I'm running R on a WinXP System. Is this ok or would a
> Linux solutuon be the better way (for using R)?

That's in the README of the Windows version.  BTW, perhaps you should ask 
in a suitable forum what the limitations of Windows are relative to Linux 
since like any application R is limited by the OS it runs on.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595