[vox] [fwd] R (programming language) Bay Area Users Group

[Norm Matloff]

On Sun, Feb 22, 2009 at 08:23:02PM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:

> On Sun, 22 Feb 2009, Norm Matloff wrote:

> > Ironically, the single-letter nature of R's name makes it hard to
> > Google things. 
 
> That's why I suggested using cran as a search term instead of R when
> you find irrelevant results using R.

Ah, good point, I missed that.

> > The R documentation is also poor, in my opinion.
 
> It certainly could be improved, but it's still fairly good. The main
> issue I've found is that some of the more complex methods of invoking
> functions like expression, call, eval, and subsitute don't have enough
> examples, and it'd be nice to have more documentation of the ways in
> which arguments are processed in R.

Right, very little in the way of "Well, where is this useful?"
 
> > I wasn't a big fan of R when I first started using it some years
> > ago, but now I find it indispensable, and in fact I'm writing a book
> > on R programming. It's an excellent language for data manipulation
> > and data graphics.
 
> Yeah, it's pretty much the only way to go if you're dealing with data
> sets and doing any kind of statistical analysis on them. [I should

R has become the standard among professional statisticians, very
impressive for an open-source product.

> point out too, that people using R should check out Sweave,[1] which
> enables you to embed R code (and its output) into LaTeX.]

Yes, a very nice feature.

> > I have an introduction to R at
 
> > http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/R/RProg.pdf
 
> [I'd note as well that your text doesn't spend much time dealing with
> some of the less trivial, but more useful aspects of coding in R, like
> grid graphics, argument handling, object methods, etc.]

The above is just an introduction.  My book will go into far more
detail.  If you have any favorite topics you think should be in there,
please let me know.

Norm