Lazy and impatient? That's me!
I find it hard to say what my biggest misconceptions were. Here's one thing: What I realized very early on: - many data analysis functions return a bunch of stuff, not all of which you see when you print() it what I *failed* to realize: - The bunch of stuff such functions return is just a *list* that has follow-on implications: - even if you're just doing some simple analysis like a linear regression, if you want to be able to see/get all the information, you really need to learn how to examine what's in a list and how to operate on the list. I had seen lists as "potentially useful but not something I need to worry about right now, since I'm having enough trouble just grokking why dataframes look different to matrices", whereas I needed to know that lists were absolutely central to what I was trying to achieve. While I have no doubt this information can be found in a dozen places, I read a bunch of introductory documents at the time, and I don't recall it being stated explicitly like that in any of the places I looked. It made a big difference to me when I realized that so many functions just return a list. I mean, it's obvious, and I should have seen that's all it was the first time, but I didn't. -- View this message in context: http://n4.nabble.com/two-questions-for-R-beginners-tp1569384p1571715.html Sent from the R help mailing list archive at Nabble.com. ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.