I came across the R Programming Wikibook at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming
It is quite surprisingly good- easy to read for a beginner- handy and concise reference for intermediate users. Some chapters like clustering could do with some more support from the community -see http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming/Clustering
- See packages class, amap and cluster
- See The R bioinformatic page on clustering
[edit]References
But I really liked the pages on Graphics, Modeling and Maths (including Matrix)
See
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming/Graphics
and http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/R_Programming/Linear_Models
I really believe that a consolidated one book online documentation can be achieved for R, only if we follow a moderated-wiki like structure. This can be of a great use- since online help documents for R are currently not concise or present a seemingly professional look (due to multiple formats and styles to the documentation) and they rarely do multiple package comparison. All this has made R books the top selling books on statistics on Amazon but a project like R deserves atleast one comprehensive online and concise book which can be used readily without going through all the scattered multiple documentation- a bit like a R Online Doc.This could help in stage next of the project in getting more users to be comfortable with it.
Any volunteers🙂 ?
Hi Ajay,
Important post, thanks for bringing up this subject!
Is there some way to know who is already committed to this project ?
Looking at the talk page I see very few editors involved.
I am asking since I don’t know what the scope of such a book should be. Is it suppose to replace the R wiki project? Is it suppose to replace (or combine) any of the current available free books on R:
http://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/
?
I think these questions should be answered for some people (such as myself) to wish to take on such a project, since without a clearer goal, I fear of putting time in something which already has good solutions for.
Maybe the people to decide it should be the group of R guru’s out there. But I am not sure if they had given the matter any thought.
Yet, again, thanks for bringing this issue up!
Best,
Tal
I dont know. But you can ask if someone like Revo Analytics, some company or even the R Core Team would be willing to be a central coordinator. What we need is a consolidated document that can add 1) show multiple packages on the same topic (eg clustering) 2) be used as a handy reference book 3) be editable and updated for package specific updates.
I kind of like your r-bloggers site and your enthusiasm- trust me R’s community has a lot of enthusiastic people but not many willing to act centrally or on the big picture! You need to write a technical post of how you created the mega blog for 69 blogs for R. Maybe someone should do the same for other stat softwares😉
Best Regards
Ajay
Hi Ajay,
I wrote to the R mailing list, and would love to see what people might think about the subject.
I am interested but skeptical, so we’ll see where the wind blows soon enough.
Thanks for the king words regarding R-bloggers🙂
I think I know how to think big only on some places, not all of them. I am flattered that you appreciate my work.
Regarding making more “X meta blog” for language X. If you are a user of a particular enviournment, and want to have that happen, send me an e-mail and we’ll talk about it.
Cheers,
Tal
Short update – no one in the mailing list replied to my post about the subject.
I guess this means interest is ->0 .