About R

The R System -- Commentary and Links

Reasons for Using R

R is free (copy it down from the internet). Use is covered by the Free Software Foundation's GNU General Public License, which is designed to guarantee the freedom of users to develop and give away the software;

R has state of the art statistical and graphical abilities, and strong scientific computational abilities, with new features regularly added;

R has a vibrant and rapidly growing user community, who contribute by discussion on various email lists, by adding new abilities, and by writing books and papers that are intended to help other users;

R has become a system of choice for statistical researchers¹. It is used increasingly for the development of software in many different areas of science and commerce;

R runs on wide variety of systems: Windows, MacOS X, UNIX, (including FreeBSD and Linux);

R makes well-designed publication-quality plots that can incorporate mathematical symbols and formulae as needed.

¹The R system has had, increasingly in the past five years, a leading role in statistical software innovation. Each year, the American Statistical Association Statistical Computing and Graphics Section makes a $1000 cash award (the John M Chambers award) for statistical software written by, or in collaboration with, an undergraduate or graduate student. All winning entries from 2003 to 2008 have been for software that is associated with R.

International Meetings

The useR! meeting is held every year. The more specialized Directions in Statistical Computing meeting, which has a strong focus on R, is held every two years. Here are a few pages of commentary on talks at the 2009 meetings.
Notes on the useR! 2009 meeting, held July 7-10 in Rennes (France), and the DSC2009 meeting, held July 13-14 in Copenhagen

Canberra R Users Group

This group is organised by Felix Andrews, Alec Zwart and John Maindonald. Go to \url{http://canrug.togaware.com/}

Links that may interest current or prospective R users

Preparation for Courses in R: From time to time I run courses on R, and on R-based statistical analysis. This document suggests preparatory reading and exercises that will help in gaining familiarity with the R command line. It lists packages that will be required or may be useful. There is a link to a document that comments on R setup under Windows.

Web site for R (CRAN = Comprehensive R Archive Network)

John Maindonald's web site

Official R email lists R-downunder

Top ten RRReasons R is bad for you?

Notes and Overheads from AMSI/SSAI ASC2008 Satellite R Workshop

email: john.maindonald AT anu.edu.au