Subject: Re: [R] mailing list for basic questions - preliminary sum up From: "Richard A. O'Keefe" Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2003 17:39:51 +1300 (NZDT) To: r-help@stat.math.ethz.ch My experience in several mailing lists and newsgroups has been that "help" from other beginners very often deserves the scare quotes. The advice is often extremely bad. The situation for R is quite different: R has the best documentation I've ever seen for any open-source package, and it's better than most commercial software I've had to deal with. The R web site has pointers to some really excellent stuff. For example, while "S Poetry" is about S rather than R, a lot of "programming" questions about R have clear explanations in that book. There are several tutorials, and the ones I looked at were good. There are a few things about using R with a particular operating system or window manager that are best shown in person. But apart from that, I'm wondering what kind of beginner questions there might be that beginners would be able to help with that aren't already in the tutorials &c. A beginner who can say "I have read , , and and tried the on-line help, and I didn't recognise the answer to " is likely to get prompt and accurate help in this mailing list. The books I've relied on for actually doing statistics have mainly been "Statistical Models in S" and "Modern Applied Statistics with S", and again, they really do answer a lot of questions. Hmm. I seem to have argued myself into the position that IF the rule in the beginner list were that anyone purporting to answer a question should justify the answer by citing the relevant R documentation or one of the commonly mentioned books about S and R, THEN it could be as educational for the answerer as for the questioner and quite helpful after all. ______________________________________________ R-help@stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help