At 11/18/2004 07:01 AM Thursday, Thomas Schönhoff wrote:
To sum up, what I am in need to is an extensive example based help-system, focused on how to do things in R. In parts this is already there, i.e. SimpleR from Verzani (contributed docs area) etc.
Hopefully I can contribute to this in future, since it is seems to me invaluable to learn R by going through example-based lessons (some are found in vignette() ).
These are much more comprehensible to me than those short reference like entries in the current help-system, mostly due to their very technical approach (same is to be said about the official GNU R manuals, especially "The R Language", which wasn't a great help for me when I took my first look at GNU R). In this context something like the GuideMaps of Vista come to my mind!
But to be as clear as possible, I think GNU R is great and I appreciate all the efforts done by the R core team and associates!
Nevertheless it seems to be valuable to re-think the help-system in R with respect to those who may have a good understanding in statistics, but lacking some basic experiences in how to introduce themselves to sophisticated world of R/S languages.
(I posted similar material before, but it was moved to R-devel, and I wanted to express a bit of it here.)
I have frequently felt, like Thomas, that what could make R easier to use is not a GUI, but a help system more focused on tasks and examples, rather than on functions and packages. This has obvious and large costs of development, and I am unlikely to contribute much myself, for reasons of time and ability. Yet, I mention it for the sake of this discussion.
Such a help system could be a tree (or key) structure in which through making choices, the user's description of the desired task is gradually narrowed. At the end of each twig of the tree would be a list of suggested functions for solving the problem, hyperlinked into the existing help system (which in many ways is outstanding and has evolved just as fast as R itself). This could be coupled with the continued expansion of the number of examples in the help system.
Now I must express appreciation for what exists already that helps in this regard: MASS (in its many editions), Introductory Statistics with R, Simple R, and the other free documentation that so many authors have generously provided. Not to mention the superlative contribution of R itself, and the work of the R development team. It is beyond my understanding how something so valuable and well thought out has been created by people with so many other responsibilities.
Mike
-- Michael Prager, Ph.D. Population Dynamics Team, NMFS SE Fisheries Science Center NOAA Center for Coastal Fisheries and Habitat Research Beaufort, North Carolina 28516 http://shrimp.ccfhrb.noaa.gov/~mprager/
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