An Introduction to S-PLUS
When you run S-PLUS,
you will create many objects.
Examples of objects are functions and datasets.
You will usually access and manage these objects
through S-PLUS, but you should know where they are stored
on the computer system.
Setting up your S-PLUS environment
To effectively keep S-PLUS objects from different projects separate,
you will need to learn a little bit of how to manipulate files and
directories in UNIX.
You will first learn how to create subdirectories
and files for this purpose.
Specific instructions on the specific UNIX commands
for this task are here.
A more general bare bones introduction to UNIX is
here.
At this point,
if you have not already done so,
follow instructions on the other pages
to make the necessary changes.
You are ready to proceed when you have a .Data subdirectory in a directory
named 496
and when you have created a .First function
which automatically opens a graphics window
and the online help window.
Chapter 1
Here is an outline of things to do from Chapter 1.
- Start S-PLUS.
- Learn how to use the online help.
- Find an interesting dataset to use for examples.
- Experiment with the functions mean, <-, dimnames, hist, and plot.
- Write an S-PLUS function in a file and read it in with source.
Other textbook references
Some of the things we mentioned in setting up your S-PLUS environment
are also in your textbook.
Here are some references.
- Command line editing.
See pages 173-174 to learn about the history function
and command line editing.
- The .First function.
See page 11 in the text.
- The fix function.
See page 115 in the text.
- Online help.
See page 2 in the text.
Last modified: March 10, 1997
Bret Larget,
larget@mathcs.duq.edu