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    A First Path Through the R On-Line Help for Beginners

There is no substitute for a good book or two, such as
  Introductory:
    "Introductory Statistics with R", Dalgaard.
    "An R and S-PLUS companion to applied regression", J. Fox
  More advanced:
    "Modern Applied Statistics with S", Venables & Ripley,
    "The (New) S Language", Becker, Chambers, & Wilks,
    "S Programming", Venables & Ripley

You should also read the documentation that comes with R,
    "An Introduction to R",
    "The R Language Definition",
and "R Data Import/Export"
at a minimum.    If you have R, you have these documents, and
they tell you a lot of things you need to know.

R has extensive on-line help.  It is so extensive that it can
be difficult to find what you need.  The purpose of this note
is to provide a first path through this on-line documentation.
THIS IS NOT AN INDEX.  Use help.search for that (I do).  It is
a small selection of help pages you should read thoroughly to
move from total novice to competent apprentice level.


To obtain on-line help about a one-word topic, type
    help(topic)
or  ?topic
at the command prompt.  If the topic is an operator or keyword
(like "+" or "for") you will have to put quotation marks around
it.  You may use quotation marks for other topics as well.


THE HELP SYSTEM ITSELF

    ?help
    ?help.search
    ?help.start

THE R LANGUAGE AND BASIC ARITHMETIC

    ?Syntax				# capital S required
    ?Arithmetic
    ?Comparison
    ?Control
    ?ifelse
    ?switch
    ?Extract				# Read with extreme care repeatedly
    ?Logic
    ?Paren

OTHER ARITHMETIC FUNCTIONS

    ?abs
    ?Bessel
    ?ceiling
    ?log
    ?Special
    ?Trig

BASIC DATA TYPES

    ?NA
    ?logical
    ?numeric
    ?character
    ?list
    ?matrix
    ?array
    ?data.frame
    ?factor

BASIC OPERATIONS ON VECTORS

    ?c					Construct column vector
    ?cumsum
    ?interaction
    ?length
    ?"["				(same as ?Extract. Read it again.)
    ?lapply
    ?na.action
    ?na.omit
    ?names
    ?order
    ?rank
    ?rep
    ?replace
    ?rev
    ?seq
    ?sequence
    ?sort
    ?sum

LOGICAL VECTORS

    ?all
    ?any
    ?ifelse
    ?subset
    ?which
    ?"%in%"
    ?"&"

STRING (CHARACTER) OPERATORS
    ?letters
    ?charmatch
    ?chartr
    ?grep
    ?match
    ?nchar
    ?paste
    ?pmatch
    ?sprintf
    ?strsplit
    ?strwidth
    ?strwrap
    ?substr
    ?system				(like `...` in sh)

MATRICES

    ?apply
    ?cbind
    ?col
    ?colMeans
    ?colnames
    ?colSums
    ?det
    ?diag
    ?dim
    ?dimnames
    ?drop
    ?eigen
    ?lower.tri
    ?ncol				Same as ?nrow
    ?outer
    ?qr
    ?rbind
    ?row
    ?rowMeans
    ?rownames
    ?rowSums
    ?rowsum
    ?solve
    ?svd
    ?t					Transpose
    ?"["				Again, with special attention to 'drop'
    ?"%*%"				Matrix multiplication
    ?"%o%"
    ?"%x%"

ELEMENTARY DESCRIPTVE STATISTICS AND TESTS

    ?binom.test
    ?chisq.test
    ?cor.test
    ?fivenum
    ?IQR
    ?ks.test
    ?mad
    ?mean
    ?median
    ?medpolish
    ?prop.test
    ?quantile
    ?range
    ?residuals
    ?sd
    ?stem
    ?summary
    ?table
    ?t.test
    ?var
    ?var.test				F test
    ?weighted.mean
    ?wilcox.test

MODEL FITTING

    ?AIC
    ?anova
    ?aov
    ?coef
    ?fitted.values
    ?formula				ESSENTIAL reading for model fitting
    ?influence.measures
    ?lm					Fits linear models
    ?predict
    ?residuals
    ?vcov

INPUT/OUTPUT

    ?connections			Opening & closing files
    ?count.fields
    ?data
    ?load
    ?readBin
    ?read.csv
    ?readLines
    ?read.table
    ?save
    ?scan
    ?write
    ?writeBin
    ?writeLines
    ?write.table

PLOTTING

    ?abline
    ?axis
    ?barplot
    ?boxplot
    ?density
    ?Devices
    ?dev.off
    ?dev.print
    ?dotchart
    ?hist
    ?legend
    ?lines
    ?par				Reread until your eyes water!
    ?plot
    ?points
    ?qqplot
    ?scatter.smooth
    ?stripchart

DISTRIBUTIONS AND RANDOM NUMBERS

Distributions have d<foo> (density), p<foo> (pdf),
q<foo> inverse pdf (quantile), and r<foo> (random generator) functions.

    ?dbeta
    ?dbinom
    ?dcauchy
    ?dchisq
    ?dexp
    ?df
    ?dgamma
    ?dgeom
    ?dhyper
    ?dlnorm
    ?dlogis
    ?dmultinom
    ?dnbinom
    ?dnorm
    ?dpois
    ?dt
    ?dunif
    ?dweibull
    ?dwilcox
    help(package=mvtnorm)
    ?sample

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