How to Describe R to Finance People

but R has also huge drawbacks.  most importantly, there is no good 
*current* textbook for an intro R user.  that is, not for the fancy 
statistical techniques, but lots about data manipulation, plots, linear 
regression, heteroskedasticity and related (white-like) corrections, 

I disagree. Peter's book does, as do several of the free pdf files on the R
website.

Having come here from financial/computational econometrics, I'd agree that
the terminology is different. There may not be a command 'ols' in the intro
texts, and you may not find a reference to HAC estimator that is called
Newey-West.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Asking Google to look for 'r-help
Newey' as in 
	http://www.google.com/search?q=r-help%20Newey
yields 50 hits (some are doubles, though).

programming, "cookbook" (ala perl cookbook---more about the simple 
stuff:  how to delete or insert a row, how to delete or insert a column, 
typical problems, especially when doing IO).  so, honestly, i cannot

It's all in the main intro book. S being an established language, there are
also many published (i.e. dead tree format) and unpublished texts. E.g. you
could do worse than starting your students off on Pat Burns' 'Guide to the
unwilling S user'. There are several S books to pick from.

That said, I do know that several people agree with your assessment that an
additional R book for Finance would find a market.  I'd expect there to be a
several of those books within a few years. Maybe you'll even write one?

one more big problem:  the name "R".  I cannot easily specify to do a 
comprehensive google search on subject matter "insert and R".  A single 

See above: substitute r-help or site:r-project.org for R and you're done.
Last but not least, there _dedicated_ R search engines linked to from the
main site. Did you try those?

Beste Gruesse,  Dirk

PS I'll CC this to r-sig-finance, we can discuss more there.

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