The Art of R Programming

You may find it helpful to browse through these topics, even without a

specific goal in mind.

1.7.5 Help for Batch Mode............................................

Recall that R has batch commands that allow you to run a command directly

from your operating system’s shell. To get help on a particular batch com-

mand, you can type:

R CMDcommand--help

For example, to learn all the options associated with theINSTALLcom-

mand (discussed in Appendix B), you can type this:

R CMD INSTALL --help

1.7.6 Help on the Internet.............................................

There are many excellent resources on R on the Internet. Here are a few:

• The R Project’s own manuals are available from the R home page,
  http://www.r-project.org/. Click Manuals.


• Various R search engines are listed on the R home page. Click Search.


• Thesospackage offers highly sophisticated searching of R materials. See
  Appendix B for instructions on how to install R packages.


• I use the RSeek search engine quite often:http://www.rseek.org/.


• You can post your R questions tor-help, the R list server. You can obtain
  information about this and other R list servers athttp://www.r-project.org/
  mail.html. You can use various interfaces. I like Gmane (http://www
  .gmane.org/).

Because of its single-letter name, R is difficult to search for using general-

purpose search engines such as Google. But there are tricks you can employ.

One approach is to use Google’s filetype criterion. To search for R scripts

(files having a.Rsuffix) pertaining to, say, permutations, enter this:

filetype:R permutations -rebol

The-rebolasks Google to exclude pages with the word “rebol,” as the

REBOL programming language uses the same suffix.

The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), athttp://cran.r-project

.org/, is a repository of user-contributed R code and thus makes for a good

Google search term. Searching for “lm CRAN,” for instance, will help you

find material on R’slm()function.

24 Chapter 1