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Its a nice post but its still my contention that the best method by which to learn any language is the "There ain't nothin' to it but to do it" method. That is,

Its a nice post but its still my contention that the best method by which to learn any language is the "There ain't nothin' to it but to do it" method. That is, to learn by experimenting with the language and by trial and error. I picked up R 2 weeks ago at work. I didn't know anything about it and I sucked at using it. I am proud to say that after 2 weeks of hard work, cursing at the computer monitor and beating my head against the cubicle wall, I am dramatically better than I was-- comparable to the experienced R programmers who work here.

buckwild 17y ago
I almost forgot. This link is an R resource that was very helpful to me. I hope it will be helpful to anyone else who may need it: http://www.rseek.org/ http://www.rseek.org/
cruise02 17y ago
> its still my contention that the best method by which to learn any language is the "There ain't nothin' to it but to do it" method. Absolutely true, but you still need something to read to introduce you to the basic syntax and the general concepts of the language. Having a bridge between a known language and a new language can significantly speed this phase up, and get you quickly to the point where you're able to start experimenting.
- jordyhoyt 17y ago
  Right. I briefly used R for research while I was in school. It was definitely a valuable tool for generating sets of random numbers, doing some statistical operations on them (PCA and SVD if you must know), and outputting them to a file that I could then pipe to my C program. It was a good example of doing one thing and doing it [pretty] well. That said, I only learned enough of R to get it to do what I wanted. The help in the interactive mode was all I really had to go off of then, and that was very helpful with plenty of examples. Being a relatively uncommon, single-letter language name, google wasn't giving me anything useful at the time. I see that is now much improved now, but this tutorial - mapping it to other languages and explaining syntax gotchas - would have saved me several hours of ramp-up for the simple tasks I wanted to accomplish.
deleted 17y ago
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madars 17y ago
> its still my contention that the best method by which to learn any language is the "There ain't nothin' to it but to do it" method. This is really good method, but doing it alone may not teach you the correct paradigms of the language. You can write FORTRAN in any language, but you probably shouldn't. If I were about to learn Python by just converting some PHP fragments, I would surely miss those characteristics that seperate Python from PHP. However, by reading other people's code or reading some documents on idiomatic Python (e.g. [1]), my understanding would be much better. [1] - http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/handout.html http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/han...

buckwild 17y ago

I almost forgot. This link is an R resource that was very helpful to me. I hope it will be helpful to anyone else who may need it: http://www.rseek.org/ http://www.rseek.org/

cruise02 17y ago

> its still my contention that the best method by which to learn any language is the "There ain't nothin' to it but to do it" method. Absolutely true, but you still need something to read to introduce you to the basic syntax and the general concepts of the language. Having a bridge between a known language and a new language can significantly speed this phase up, and get you quickly to the point where you're able to start experimenting.

jordyhoyt 17y ago
Right. I briefly used R for research while I was in school. It was definitely a valuable tool for generating sets of random numbers, doing some statistical operations on them (PCA and SVD if you must know), and outputting them to a file that I could then pipe to my C program. It was a good example of doing one thing and doing it [pretty] well. That said, I only learned enough of R to get it to do what I wanted. The help in the interactive mode was all I really had to go off of then, and that was very helpful with plenty of examples. Being a relatively uncommon, single-letter language name, google wasn't giving me anything useful at the time. I see that is now much improved now, but this tutorial - mapping it to other languages and explaining syntax gotchas - would have saved me several hours of ramp-up for the simple tasks I wanted to accomplish.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

madars 17y ago

> its still my contention that the best method by which to learn any language is the "There ain't nothin' to it but to do it" method. This is really good method, but doing it alone may not teach you the correct paradigms of the language. You can write FORTRAN in any language, but you probably shouldn't. If I were about to learn Python by just converting some PHP fragments, I would surely miss those characteristics that seperate Python from PHP. However, by reading other people's code or reading some documents on idiomatic Python (e.g. [1]), my understanding would be much better. [1] - http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/handout.html http://python.net/~goodger/projects/pycon/2007/idiomatic/han...