[R] two questions for R beginners

[Saeed Abu Nimeh]

On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 9:31 AM, Patrick Burns <pburns at pburns.seanet.com> wrote:
> * What were your biggest misconceptions or
> stumbling blocks to getting up and running
> with R?

1- Compared to other programming languages it is hard to learn R by
example, because it is hard to find code on the web that will do the
exact thing you are looking for, sometimes you might get lucky though.
By contrast, take Perl for example, it is an easy language to learn by
example.

2- The R mailing list. Beginners get frustrated after they struggle
for a long time to solve a problem and the easiest thing then is to
send an email to the R mailing list. I did this in the past. The best
thing that happened was that my request was neglected and I had to
spend more time on the problem and find a solution by myself
eventually. Do not get me wrong, I am not saying that the mailing list
is bad, but it should be more organized. Maybe broken down into couple
of other mailing lists. This might bring up a good discussion thread.

>
> * What documents helped you the most in this
> initial phase?

An Introduction to R by Venables
simpleR – Using R for Introductory Statistics by Verzani