The R-taskhelps project is intended to add illustratory documentation for users of the R program for statistical analysis. R is arguably one of the best statistical packages in existance, and it is published under the GPL; it's free, it's pretty robust, and it works well.

R has an incredible amount of documentation available for it. However, the complexity of R is such that much of that documentation is terse, more out of necessity and practicality than anything else. We feel that the production of general introductions to various R functionalities in the form of tutorial documents would be a useful addition to the R documentation, and thus we are working towards developing such documents.

Goals

Currently, we have an initial example of a tutorial-like document for R, dealing with many common R tasks. The document can be found here and we invite comments for this and future documents.

Current Status

• Data frame manipulation, merging and splitting datasets, restricting analysis to subsets, etc.
• Graphing. A general primer would be useful, because many of these basic graphing questions come up repeately on R-help.
• Specialized graphing techniques, beyond the introduction intended in the previous point. This could also include making production quality graphs for publication, multiple-section graphs, and how to configure these different regions.
• Visualization techniques using Xgobi. This could easily be a document in itself; Some documentation exists for Xgobi, but it tends to be limited to a basic description of the interface as well as some of the functions. Combining R and Xgobi gives an analytical tool without peer, and being able to use both effectively is a worthy aim.

TODO

We're looking for more R users to add their own documents to this list. Please contact Pete St. Onge if you would like to contribute documentation or editing skills

Help Wanted