The University of Adelaide
Email: venables@stats.adelaide.edu.au
© W. Venables, 1990, 1992.
Version 2.1, July, 1992
These notes were originally intended only for local consumption at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. After some encouraging comments from students, the author decided to release them to a larger readership in the hope that in some small way they promote good data analysis. S (or S-PLUS) is no panacea, of course, but in offering simply a coherent suite of general and flexible tools to devise precisely the right kind of analysis, rather than a collection of packaged standard analyses, in my view it represents the single complete environment most conducive to good data analysis so far available.
Some evidence of the local origins of these notes is still awkwardly apparent. For example they use the Tektronics graphics emulations on terminals and workstations, which at the time of writing is still the only one available to the author. The X11 windowing system, which allows separate windows for characters and graphics simultaneously to be displayed, is much to be preferred and it will be used in later versions. Also the local audience would be very familiar with MINITAB, MATLAB, Glim and Genstat, and various echoes of these persist. At one point some passing acquaintance with the Australian States is assumed, but the elementary facts are given in a footnote for foreign readers.
Comments and corrections are always welcome. Please address email correspondence to the author at wvenable@stats.adelaide.edu.au.
The author is indebted to many people for useful contributions, but in
particular Lucien W. Van Elsen, who did the basic
to
conversion and Rick Becker who offered an authoritative and extended
critique on an earlier version. Responsibility for this version, however,
remains entirely with the author, and the notes continue to enjoy a fully
unofficial and unencumbered status.
These notes may be freely copied and redistributed for any educational purpose provided the copyright notice remains intact. Where appropriate, a small charge to cover the costs of production and distribution, only, may be made.
Bill Venables, University of Adelaide, 16th December, 1990.
As foreshadowed above the present version of the notes contains references to the use of S in a workstation environment, although I hope they remain useful to the user on an ordinary graphics terminal. Of much greater importance, however, are the language developments that have taken place in S itself in the August 1991 release. These are only partially addressed in this version of the notes, as a complete coverage would require a document of much greater length than was ever intended. I trust however that the sketches given here are useful and a spur to the reader to seek further enlightenment in the standard reference materials.
The present notes are also centred around S-PLUS rather than plain vanilla S. This simply reflects a change in the implementation of S made available to my students and me by my employer. It should not be read as any sort of endorsement one way or another.
My sincere thanks to David Smith, James Pearce and Ron Baxter for many useful suggestions.
Bill Venables, University of Adelaide, 13th April, 1992.