On 06/05/04 10:11, ivo welch wrote: >but R has also huge drawbacks. most importantly, there is no good >*current* textbook for an intro R user. that is, not for the fancy >statistical techniques, but lots about data manipulation, plots, linear >regression, heteroskedasticity and related (white-like) corrections, >programming, "cookbook" (ala perl cookbook---more about the simple >stuff: how to delete or insert a row, how to delete or insert a column, >typical problems, especially when doing IO). so, honestly, i cannot >recommend R to my finance students right now.
I recommend to students that they read the Introduction that comes with R for this purpose, then the "Notes..." that I wrote with Yuelin Li. See the "R references" section of my R page (below). Unfortunately, these notes are not meant to be a complete text, and they don't even cover all the points you just mentioned (although they probably should). Yuelin, if I may speak for him, has expressed some interest in expanding our Notes into an actual textbook, eventually, so your comments may encourage him. Still, I think you might find these notes helpful for students. (And there are other similar sets of introductory documents in the R contributed documents section: http://cran.r-project.org/other-docs.html.) I also recommend a reference card (see my page, which links to another one in addition to the one in the R contributed docs page), which is a good substitute for a GUI. And I provide templates for the kinds of analyses that students will do, so that the students can modify the templates without understanding everything in them. That said, I'm not talking about a class of 300. I end up doing a lot of help by email. It would be overwhelming with a large class (or the students would be too shy to ask for help, in which case _they_ would be overwhelmed). >one more big problem: the name "R". I cannot easily specify to do a >comprehensive google search on subject matter "insert and R". A single >letter like R just does not connect well with google. this is of course >steeped in too much history, but a name change would help---calling it >some random 6-letter combination. Google is pretty smart. If you enter "R" and nothing else, you get to the right place. But you might also find my R page helpful. My students use that too. I think that the name R is here to stay. It has a certain coolness about it. Jon -- Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania Home page: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron R search page: http://finzi.psych.upenn.edu/ ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
