Hi, I'm very confused about R structures and the methods to go with them. I'm using R for microarray analysis with Bioconductors. Suppose without reading the documentations, what's the best way to explore a data structure when you know nothing about it?
I am currently using is() / class() to see what the object is. str() / attributes() to probe inside the object, and someth...@something$something to walk it and explore. Is there any other way? Also, without reading documentations, is there a way to know what functions are available to extract data from it? For example, there is sampleNames() which works on ExpressionSet and AnnotatedDataFrame (which is a part of ExpressionSet). How do I know they are available (as sometimes I can't recall where I've seen them and I forgot the function names). And what are R functions? Are those two separate functions or polymorphic functions? I'm also pretty confused about S3, S4, or the regular list. I guess I'm fairly confused about R in general. Any good source of reading (hopefully short and understandable, too) would be appreciated. Thanks. Timothy [[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.