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API documentation?

tom sgouros
Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand at nhh.no> wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
I would tend to second this.  I've been lurking on the list for a few
months, hoping to learn a bit, but so far without much success, since
the conversation and the documentation are so far above where I am and
what I need.  I am almost familiar with R, using it for time-series
statistics, and learned early on that the Dalgaard book was a better
intro than any of the real R documents.  It doesn't cover nearly
everything, but it seems to cover what I needed, so I use what is
probably a baby-level set of R functions, but it's adequate.  Without a
professor lurking over my shoulder to explain stuff, I am perpetually
slightly lost, because all the documentation assumes I know stuff that I
don't.

I still use R because I know that with enough poking around it will
eventually provide a solution.  But if the alternatives were not very
expensive, I would have given up a while ago.

I joined this group when I wanted to expand into making maps of
geographical economic data, and after a month of working on the problem,
I essentially had to give up for the time being.  I wish there were an
introduction that showed me how to use R with a GIS program, but to my
knowledge, there is not.  I did run across a GRASS book that claimed it
would help, but as I recall, it cost upward of US$100.

To make this more useful than just a rant, I would second David's point.
What is missing is only what David misses: an introduction that says
where to start to deal with simple geographic data, maybe providing a
few examples of common techniques and frequent problems, and pushing
data back and forth to some GIS.  I was not able to find that, and
without it, found the R documentation pretty much useless.  I'd be happy
to know of some source I hadn't found before, so if you have one to
recommend, please do.

 -tom