stat480

Homework: week 7

Due 4 Mar.

Pick one of the introductions to R listed below. I have labelled the ones I think are most useful, but I might be wrong, so you may want to look through a few to find one that appeals to you

Work through the introduction, and as you work through it, note where you have trouble following, where the ideas are poorly motivated, what bits you liked, what didn't follow on, was confusing etc..

Then write a one page review summarising the introduction. I want to know what you learned, and I want you to assess the quality of the introduction.

Some questions to get you started: What areas do you think were covered well, what were covered poorly, what couldn't you understand? What techniques did the document use to help you learn? Were they successful? How did it make you feel? Bored? Interested? Frustrated? Could you read through it in one setting? Would you use the same resource again? How could it be improved? What would you do differently? What did they do that I should do? How long did it take you to do?

Please use single spacing, and margins no bigger than 1".

Introductions to R

Highly recommended

Introduction to R, by Andreas Buja. The whole introduction is written in R, so you can run through it and experiment. Before running each line I recommend you predict what output you will get. This will help you learn faster
R for ecologists, yes, even though you're not ecologists, this is still good

Others

Section one of simpleR (PDF), by John Verzani.
Section three of R for beginners (PDF) by Emmanuel Paradis.
Sections two and three of The R guide (PDF) by WJ Owen.
The official introduction to R, which I don't recommend as I find it very hard going.