Getting Help

A plethora of resources are available to help you learn more about R. These include several facilities within R itself and, of course, on the Web.

Much work has gone into making R self-documenting. We’ll look at some of R’s built-in help facilities and then at those available on the Internet.

The help() Function

To get online help, invoke help(). For example, to get information on the seq() function, type this:

> help(seq)

The shortcut to help() is a question mark (?):

> ?seq

Special characters and some reserved words must be quoted when used with the help() function. For instance, you need to type the following to get help on the < operator:

> ?"<"

And to see what the online manual has to say about for loops, enter this:

> ?"for"

The example() ...

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