R Taskhelps



The R-taskhelps project is intended to add illustratory documentation for users of the R program for statistical analysis. R is arguably one of the best statistical packages in existance, and it is published under the GPL; it's free, it's pretty robust, and it works well.

R has an incredible amount of documentation available for it. However, the complexity of R is such that much of that documentation is terse, more out of necessity and practicality than anything else. We feel that the production of general introductions to various R functionalities in the form of tutorial documents would be a useful addition to the R documentation, and thus we are working towards developing such documents.

Goals


Currently, we have an initial example of a tutorial-like document for R, dealing with many common R tasks. The document can be found here and we invite comments for this and future documents.

Current Status


Future explanatory documentation efforts could focus on:
  • Data frame manipulation, merging and splitting datasets, restricting analysis to subsets, etc.
  • Graphing. A general primer would be useful, because many of these basic graphing questions come up repeately on R-help.
  • Specialized graphing techniques, beyond the introduction intended in the previous point. This could also include making production quality graphs for publication, multiple-section graphs, and how to configure these different regions.
  • Visualization techniques using Xgobi. This could easily be a document in itself; Some documentation exists for Xgobi, but it tends to be limited to a basic description of the interface as well as some of the functions. Combining R and Xgobi gives an analytical tool without peer, and being able to use both effectively is a worthy aim.

TODO


We're looking for more R users to add their own documents to this list. Please contact Pete St. Onge if you would like to contribute documentation or editing skills

Help Wanted


This page maintaned by Pete St. Onge. Please report any technical problems to webmaster@seul.org