Sources of help, documentation

## 23  Sources of help, documentation

Many questions about R are asked and answered on the R mailing list. Details for subscribing or posting are on the webpage www.r-project.org. Please be respectful of the time of others and only ask questions after giving yourself enough time to figure it out.

There are a number of tutorials, documents and books that can help one learn R. The fact that the language is very similar to S-Plus means that the large number of books that pertain to this are readily applicable to learning R. In this appendix, a list of free documentation is offered and a few books are quickly reviewed.
The R program

The R-source contains much documentation. Online help, and several manuals (in PDF format) are available with the R-software. The manual An Introduction to R'' by the R core development team is an excellent introduction to R for people familiar with statistics. It has many interesting examples of R and a comprehensive treatment of the features of R. It is an excellent source of information for you after you have finished these notes.

Free documentation
The R project website http://www.r-project.org has several user contributed documents. These are located at http://cran.R-project.org/other-docs.html.
• statsRus at http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/ pauljohn/R/statsRus.html is a well done compilation of R tips and tricks.
• The notes Using R for Data Analysis and Graphics'' by John Maindonald are excellent. They are more advanced than these, but the first 5 chapters will be very good reading for students at the level of these notes.
• R for Beginners / R pour les débutants'' by Emmanuel Paradis offers a very concise, but quite helpful guide to the features of R. It is a valuable resource for looking up aspects of R.
• Kickstarting R'' compiled by Jim Lemon, is a nice, a short introduction in English.
• Notes on the use of R for psychology experiments and questionnaires'' by Jonathan Baron and Yuelin Li is useful for students in the social sciences and offers a nice, quick overview of the data extraction and statistical features of R.

Books
The book Introductory Statistics with R'' by P. Dalagard is aimed at the same audience as these notes. It is much more comprehensive though. The only drawback is the price which is on the expensive side for casual usage.

For advanced users, the book Modern Applied Statistics with S-PLUS'' by W.N. Venables and B.D. Ripley is fantastic. It is authoritative, informative and full of useful functions and data sets.

The book "Learning S-Plus" (Duxbury) is a fairly comprehensive introduction to the powers of S-Plus. It is written at a similar level as "An Introduction to R".