In this session we will discuss how to get help online with Bioconductor. The most useful resource for online help with Bioconductor is the support site or the support forum. You can navigate to that by going to the Bioconductor webpage. And out here to the right under learn, there's a port site. That gets taken to a standout form. We can see we have questions here people can answer. And out here underneath the title of the question, you can see that each question gets automatically checked. With a number of text. This ensures that questions about specific packages gets forwarded also to the packet's main chain, who may or may not answer. It takes a little bit of learning to learn how to efficiently ask a question on a mailing list. There's a guide for that if we go back to the bottom of the webpage down on the uses. You can see there is also a link to the support site, a little confusing. And here's a little text about the support site. And there is a link to a posting guide, which I highly recommend that people use. Key information is that when you ask a question, you try to always include the output of session info. Session info is and there's a little r function that displays the current state of your system which is highly useful. Another thing that I find when people ask questions is that they tend to include too little information in their postings. The way I like to ask questions is, I like to ask a clean, short question. And then below the question I copy and paste all the output that I need. The code that I am using, and all the information. That may take up a lot of space sometimes. I've even copied thousands of lines of output into the question, but that is sometimes necessary for people to help you efficiently. So I'll encourage everybody to sign up for the support site and to use it and to eventually graduate to a level where you can start helping other people with their problems. An alternative to support site is a stack overflow. Stack overflow is a website that provides forms for a lot of computer related questions. [COUGH] And they can tack their questions using different programming languages and environments that we insert for Bioconductor. [COUGH] We get a little test of whether we are humans. And here's a tag for Bioconductor. Once I click on. [COUGH] And now I have everything that's being tagged with Bioconductor. This is also useful, this is not a form that I use myself but it's highly used in computer science and for some programming language, it's incredibly helpful. Let's now transition to something slightly different which is searching for help in online documentation. So our search with documentation from packages that you've installed. That's very useful. But sometimes you want to search for a function you've heard about or you've read about, you don't know which package it's in, you don't really know what search term you should use and so on, and for that purpose there are two, I would say, competing online resources. The first thing is called rdocumentation which gives you this very nice Search box here where we can search for specific packages, function names, description, authors and so on. This searches the rdocumentation across all packages in Cran and all packages in Bioconductor, and possibly other places. So let's search for a function here. Let's look for fund overlaps, which is a function we will learn to love in this course. And here's some hits on some help pages. [COUGH] An alternative to rdocumentation is another website called rseek. It does a little bit of the same but it uses a different search interface. It looks very much like Google. We have this nice minimalist bar here. Let's search for findOverlaps. It also searches across R documentation, but as you can see here it searches the support site, it searches R bloggers. And I call them all the resources. I use both of them occasionally and I'm still trying to make up my mind which one I like the best.
