5 Finding Help
Overview
One of my vivid memories from learning to use R was the frustration of trying to find help when things went wrong: confusing error messages, long help files, and trying to find help online. In this chapter, we’ll introduce R help files and discuss strategies for finding help online.
One thing to remember - R is not like much software that is designed to do specific tasks, R is a language, an environment for analysis, etc. As a result, it is often the case that there is more than one way to do almost anything in R. This means that when we ask “how do I do X in R,” we have to figure out which method makes the most sense. We’ll work with Chapter 5 of Essential R Course Notes.
Objectives
Upon completion of this lesson, you should be able to:
- access the help files in R,
- use the example code from help files, and
- Use RSeek to search for help on topics.
Data and R Code Files
There is no code file for this chapter. See the exercises at the end of Chapter 5 for more practice.
5.1 Understanding R Help Files
In this video, we’ll look at how R help files are structured.
5.2 Using R Help Files
Here we’ll discuss the example code in help files, the “see also” links, and the use of the “??” search.
5.3 Getting Help Online: Rseek.org
The help system in R is quite good when you know the function that you need help on, or a related function. The more difficult situation arises when you really don’t know which function you need. At such times RSeek is usually extremely helpful.
5.4 Getting Help Online: Using Help Forums
Probably the feature of Rseek that I use most often is the “Issues” tab, which lists search results on help forums (many of which are hosted by the r-project). Here we’ll introduce these and also discuss posting to the R mailing lists if you should need to. (Based on my experience this is somewhat unlikely - I am almost always able to find an answer to my question or a similar question in the forums). Please do note the requirements for posting to the mailing lists or anywhere else (including Piazza); if you follow the posting guidelines carefully, you make it easy for people to help you.