No, today is not Talk Like A Pirate Day. “R” is a statistical software (more like an environment) which was inspired by “S” and was originally developed by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka. Nowadays, more than a dozen contributors are working on development and bug fixes. There are also more than 4700 extensions (called “packages” in R-lingo) written and shared by R users.
In my opinion, the three most important things you should now about R are the following:
- It’s free.
- It’s platform independent.
- You can use it for basically anything (if you don’t believe me take a look at the project tree).
A few bits and bobs for getting started with R:
- The official webpage,
- Downloads, archive and packages: CRAN
- Frequently Asked Questions
- User Manuals (Yes, as in more than one.)
- R Wiki
- The official citation for R:
R Core Team (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical
computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria.
URL http://www.R-project.org/.
