help on R programming.

Hello all,

I am looking for books to help me gain a firmer grasp on the S/R
programming language ,  programing / data structures etc. it seems that
for this purpose two books are typically recommended: 

Programming with Data: A Guide to the S Language, John M. Chambers and
S Programming by Venables & Ripley.

- The Chambers book is published 1998. is it a bit dated at this point.
- is the Venables and Ripley's book a good source on the design and
manipulation of data structures in R (it seems mostly focused on R
extensions).
- are there any other books, possibly published more recently, that you
could recommend.


I also have a couple of particular programming questions:

-coming from a C++/java programming background I found that I often end
up in R with lists of objects (each constructed, in turn, as a list, say
list(x=x,y=y,z=z)). often, these individual objects have recursive
'attributes' so a matrix representation of this set of objects is not an
option. although a data.frame might be. I typically need to access
certain attributes of these objects for plotting or analysis etc.
however, I have not been able to come up with a clean way to do this?
e.g.

object.list = list(o1=list(x=1,y=2,z=3), o2=list(x=11,y=22,z=33))

what I would like to do is say get a vector of x values for the objects
in object.list, but something like
object.list[[1:length(object.list)]]$x, for example, returns NULL.

is there a better way to set up such an object list data structure that
will allow me to do this?

- what is the correct way to -remove- a component from a list. this
seems to do the trick: list[[1]] = NULL, however, you'd think this
should simply attach a NULL object at the first component position?  

many thanks for any help

Murad Nayal M.D. Ph.D.
Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University
630 West 168th Street. New York, NY 10032
Tel: 212-305-6884	Fax: 212-305-6926