To me, as a biologist recycled to biostats, I have always worked with Excel and then SPSS and moving to R was difficult (and still is, since I am still learning).
Being a self-taught person, I learn R looking for examples in Google, which many times takes me to Rwiki or other. I sometimes post questions and most of the answers were helpful, but I have found that sometimes the answers have been too short or didn´t give enough hints as to how to follow, and that has stopped me from asking again in order not to annoy experts. I have not answered too many questions from newbies but I have tried to explain as much as I could. Sometimes I find it better not to answer rather than just answering a short vague answer. Please, examples, examples, examples! I found most difficult the different data types, since I understand excel as a data frame with columns and rows, and that´s it. Then as someone has already commented, the class, mode and str functions helped a lot. But I think that to me, examples are the way to let people learn. >From that, I moved to use loops, and am still nervous when people suggest >ussing *apply functions, I can´t get down to use them!. I find loops more >logical, and can´t see the way of moving them to *apply. Finally, I am not a Linux expert , and I cannot get round to install and organise a proper R directory and keep updated. I have once tried to use a package that needed the development R version and was only prepared for Linux R, but couldn´t keep the R-devel versions updated. Some more step-by-step would help sometimes. Thanks for a great tool! > Date: Tue, 2 Mar 2010 12:44:23 -0600 > From: keo.orms...@gmail.com > To: landronim...@gmail.com > CC: r-help@r-project.org; pbu...@pburns.seanet.com > Subject: Re: [R] two questions for R beginners > > Liviu Andronic escribió: > > On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 11:49 PM, Liviu Andronic <landronim...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > > >> On 3/1/10, Keo Ormsby <keo.orms...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> > >>> Perhaps my biggest problem was that I couldn't (and still haven't) seen > >>> *absolute beginners* documents. > >>> > >>> > >> there was once a link posted on r-sig-teaching that would probably fit > >> your needs, but I cannot find it now. > >> > >> > > > > OK, I found it. Below is an excerpt of that r-sig-teaching e-mail. > > Liviu > > > > On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 2:19 PM, Robert W. Hayden <hay...@mv.mv.com> wrote: > > > >> I think such a website would be a real asset. It would be most useful > >> if it either were restricted to intro. stats. OR organized so that > >> materials for real beginners were easy to extract from all the > >> materials for programmers and Ph.D. statisticians. As a relative > >> beginner myself, I find the usual resources useless. In self defense, > >> I created materials for my own beginning students: > >> > >> http://courses.statistics.com/software/R/Rhome.htm > >> > Hi Liviu, > This is indeed the best site for introduction I have seen. Although it > still assumes some things that at first might seem unintuitive to the > absolute beginner I talk about. For instance, in the first page, it > shows that you can do sqrt(x), where x can be a vector, and return a > vector of the square roots of each number. Although this is high school > matrix algebra, most users expect that the input to square root function > to be a single number, not a matrix, as in Excel or a calculator. Other > concepts that are not explicitly introduced are "R workspace", the use > of arguments in functions (with or without the "="), etc. Others are > things like diff(range(rainfall)) , where you have the output of one > function used as the input to another, all in the same command line. All > these things seem very basic, but can be difficult if you are trying to > learn on your own with no prior experience in programming. > I hope I am not sounding too difficult and contrarian, I am just trying > to share my experience with starting with R, and in trying to convey > this learning to my colleagues and students. In the end, I did find > everything I needed to learn, and now I feel at ease with R, and I > believe that almost anybody that can use Excel or something like it, > could learn R. > > Thank you for the information, > Best wishes, > Keo. > > ______________________________________________ > 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. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
______________________________________________ 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.
