[R] Feedback on you manual

Steve Lianoglou mailinglist.honeypot at gmail.com
Sun Oct 24 05:35:10 CEST 2010


Hi Liping,

On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 2:18 AM, 刘力平 <liping.liulp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Sir/Madam:
>
> Great thanks for R project and you contribution.
>
> I am Liping Liu, a beginner of R. Recently, I use R much. I wish you could
> improve the manual by making it search engine friendly.
>
> The "Introduction to R" page is too long. I am often redirected to this page
> by goole, but I still can not find the content I need easily.

Speaking as as an older R-user to a new R-user, I can understand some
of the frustrations you feel with coming up to speed with a new
programming language.

One piece of advice I have for you is that you should actually take
the time to read through the entirety of that "An Introduction to R"
page you keep stumbling upon. You can get through most of it in a
night, and having read through it you'll likely be able to jump to
relevant places of it when google sends you there as a result of one
of your queries.

Another piece of advice is for you to look a bit closer at the search
results google provides. Using the context of the page that is
returned under the google-provided-link, you can easily jump to that
portion of the page using your browser's "Find" functionality.

For instance, I searched google for "index vector r"

One of the results was a link back to the Intro to R page. That
particular result from google looked like this:

An Introduction to R
Jump to Index matrices‎: As well as an index vector in any subscript
position, a matrix ...
cran.r-project.org/doc/manuals/R-intro.html - Cached - Similar

(The first line there is the link to the intro web page, the second
line is the "context" I'm referring to).

You can click on the "An introduction to R" link. Once the page loads,
invoke your browser's "Find" and write (or paste) into the find dialog
"index vector in any subscript position" (I just copied this from the
2nd line in the google result). You will be taken to the part of the
page that google has found relevant for you.

Hope that helps,
-steve
-- 
Steve Lianoglou
Graduate Student: Computational Systems Biology
 | Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
 | Weill Medical College of Cornell University
Contact Info: http://cbio.mskcc.org/~lianos/contact



More information about the R-help mailing list