On Monday 09 January 2006 11:31, Gabor Grothendieck wrote: > . . . > > I certainly was not disparaging books. I said _in addition to_ books, > not _insted of_. The reason I pointed this out is that I think > most people already read the books. What many people don't > do as far as can tell is read the code. Obviously if you are just > starting out you are going to be relying on the documentation, > books, etc. but once you get past the intro stage you need to get > into code. One repeatedly sees questions on this list where just > a minute or two spent with the code would have answered the > question. > Gabor,
The issue IS the INTRO stage though, in fact well beyond the intro stage. Reading the code is well and good for a programmer, but many are not and never will be coders, and this group is going to continue to expand. Even an advanced statistician migrating from a proprietary system like SPSS to R is going to need documentation. They would not even know where in the code to look! Code is cool, but it really isn't expository. John ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html
