R Function Guide
Strange as it may seem, I've been digging into R a lot these last few months and, although I was aware of help.start(), I hadn't ever tried the search link. That is a very nice feature. I humbly suggest that section 1.7 in the R Intro have a line added that goes something like this: "The 'Search Engine and Keywords' link in the page loaded by help.start() is particularly useful as it is contains a high-level concept list which searches though available functions. It can be a great way to get you bearings quickly and to understand the breadth of what R has to offer." Chris Marshall -----Original Message----- From: Uwe Ligges To: freud at starpower.net Cc: R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch Sent: 6/6/01 2:14 AM Subject: Re: [R] R Function Guide
freud at starpower.net wrote:
I was wondering if there was anything for R like the function guide provided by insightful for S-Plus at the url below: http://www.insightful.com/resources/fguide.html What makes if particularly appealing is the organization of functions by class. If there is not something like this for R, I think it would be a great addition to the R documentation. It would provide an easy way to identify an available function for a particular category of analysis and thus facilitate viewing the help pages for the appropriate function or functions--particularly if this were available for not
just
base packages, but contributed packages as well. Personally, I find the biggest weakness of the current help system is the fact that I must know the name of a function in advance to request help on some analysis or proceedure. Would be nice to start with a general idea, category, class, or set of proceedures and move to a list of related functions. Extending the original idea, wouldn't it be great if there were a list as described above that, in addition to listing functions by category, also provided package information, availability, version, etc for the listed functions. I recognize that there is probably some overlap with the S-Plus guide, and that it in itself is probably a good reference, or at least
a
nice starting point for a simliar R guide. However, I also suspect that quite a lot of the S-Plus functionality listed is not yet implemented in R. Perhaps I am wrong.
Use help.start() and go to "Search Engine & Keywords". Uwe Ligges -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-. -.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._. _._._._ -.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.- r-help mailing list -- Read http://www.ci.tuwien.ac.at/~hornik/R/R-FAQ.html Send "info", "help", or "[un]subscribe" (in the "body", not the subject !) To: r-help-request at stat.math.ethz.ch _._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._._