Obtaining Help With R and S-PLUS

An R and S-PLUS Companion to Applied Regression

John Fox

Several sources of help are available to users of R and S-PLUS:

Both R and S-PLUS come with extensive on-line help, accessible through the help function, ? operator, and Help menu. In R, you can also search for functions and help information using the apropos and help.search functions. Enter the command help(apropos) or help(help.search) for more information.
If you installed R as I have suggested, Portable Document Format (pdf) files containing the R manuals will be part of the installation. Assuming that you have also installed a pdf-file viewer, such as the free Acrobat viewer available from Adobe, you will be able to access these manuals from the R Help menu (and print them, if you wish). R also comes with frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) lists. Look in the doc subdirectory of the main R directory.
S-PLUS comes with a set of manuals, both on-line, as pdf files (accessible through the Help menu), and in printed form.
Documentation for R, including the manuals, frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) lists, user-contributed documentation, and newletters, is available at CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network) and on the R home page.
Support information for S-PLUS, including documentation, frequently-asked-questions (FAQ) lists, and technical support, is available at the Insightful Corporation web site.
Several email lists are available for users of R, including a list (r-help) to which you can post questions. Archives of the R email lists are also available, and there is are search facilities for R documentation and email lists.
Likewise, there is an email list for S-PLUS (s-news) to which users post questions, and for which there is a searchable archive.

Before posting to the r-help or s-news list:

Posting a question to the r-help or s-news list should not be your first resort. The individuals who answer questions posted to these lists are volunteering their time. Before you post a question, you should make an attempt to answer it yourself using the resources listed here. In particular, please carefully read the posting guide before posting a question to the r-help list.

Last modified: 4 December 2004 by John Fox <jfox AT mcmaster.ca >