Chapter 1. Getting Started and Getting Help
This chapter sets the groundwork for the other chapters. It explains how to download, install, and run R.
More importantly, it also explains how to get answers to your questions. The R community provides a wealth of documentation and assistance. You are not alone. Here are some common sources of help:
- Local, installed documentation
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When you install R on your computer, a mass of documentation is also installed. You can browse the local documentation (Recipe 1.7) and search it (Recipe 1.9). We are amazed how often we search the web for an answer only to discover it was already available in the installed documentation.
- Task views
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A task view describes packages that are specific to one area of statistical work, such as econometrics, medical imaging, psychometrics, or spatial statistics. Each task view is written and maintained by an expert in the field. There are more than 35 such task views, so there is likely to be one or more for your areas of interest. We recommend that every beginner find and read at least one task view in order to gain a sense of R’s possibilities (Recipe 1.12).
- Package documentation
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Most packages include useful documentation. Many also include overviews and tutorials, called vignettes in the R community. The documentation is kept with the packages in package repositories such as CRAN, and it is automatically installed on your machine when you install a package.
- Question and answer (Q&A) websites
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On a Q&A ...
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