Keep in mind, of course, that elder people are very busy, and their time is limited,
and although they may be willing to help you by answering a question,
they may only have a certain amount of time to devote to answering that question.
Now I am here, of course, as the instructor, to help you in all
circumstances, but furthermore, I may not be able to answer all possible questions.
And so you're going to want to use the resources that you have available to you
in this course.
So, in your search for answers, there are a variety of things that you can do
on your own before venturing off to ask other people for the answer.
So, if you're going to be emailing a question to a forum or to a mailing list,
it's important that you search the archives of that forum for the answers.
So it's possible, and depending on the size of the forum,
almost very likely that someone has asked the same question that you're asking.
And if someone else has asked that question, and it has been answered,
then the answer is going to be in the archive of that forum.
So if the answer's already there, you've saved everyone a lot of time, including
yourself, if you search the archives for the forum and just find the answer.
Of course, the web is very large and has many answers, and
your first reaction when you have a question is to search the web.
For given the type of program you're using, for example, here we're using R,
there are many manuals that are available, and many answers may exist in the manual.
There's a frequently asked question,
or a FAQ that's on the R website that you can look for that contains many
questions that are commonly come up on the mailing lists and on the forums.
Another thing that you might want to try to do before go
venturing out to ask people for the answer is to play around with the problem and
try to find the answer by inspecting or experimentations.
Maybe if you have a function that's not working right, maybe change the inputs and
see if the outputs change or if the error message changes.
If you're lucky enough to have a skilled friend who knows something about R,
you can ask them personally, and it's usually easier to ask a person
on a one on one basis than to email a group of people in a forum.
Furthermore, and lastly, if you're a programmer,
you maybe able to find the answers you're looking for by reading the source code.