1.5 Getting Help

As R is constantly evolving and new functions/packages are introduced every day it is good to know sources of help. The most basic help one can get is via the help() function. This function shows the help file for a function which has been created by package managers.

help("function name")
  • The following can be used to search for a function etc.
#Replace the 'search string' with the expression you want to search 
??search string

  • All the R packages (with few exceptions) have a user’s manual listing the functions in a package. This can be downloaded in PDF format from the R package download page2.

  • R also provides some search tools given at http://cran.r-project.org/search.html The R Site search is helpful in searching for topics related to problem in hand.

  • Other than these various good R related blogs are on the internet which can be really helpful. A combined upto date view of 452 contributed blogs can be found at R-bloggers3.

  • Over all there quite a big community of R Users and help can be found for most of the topics.

  1. For example reference manual for quantreg package is at http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/quantreg/quantreg.pdf↩︎

  2. Go to [www.r-bloggers.com]: www.r-bloggers.com↩︎