R-software introduction
R is an open-source (GPL) statistical environment
modeled after S and S-Plus. The S
language was developed in the late 1980s at AT&T labs. The R project was
started by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka (hence the name, R) of the
Statistics Department of the University of Auckland in 1995. It has quickly
gained a widespread audience. It is currently maintained by the R
core-development team, a hard-working, international team of volunteer
developers. The R project web page is the
main site for information on R. At this site are directions for obtaining the
software, accompanying packages and other sources of documentation.
R is a powerful statistical program but it is
first and foremost a programming language. Many routines have been written for
R by people all over the world and made freely available from the R project website as "packages".
However, the basic installation (for Linux, Windows or Mac) contains a powerful
set of tools for most purposes.
Because R is a programming language it can seem a
bit daunting; you have to type in commands to get it to work. However, it does
have a Graphical User Interface (GUI) to make things easier. You can also copy
and paste text from other applications into it (e.g. word processors). So, if
you have a library of these commands it is easy to pop in the ones you need for
the task at hand. That is the purpose of this web page; to provide a library of
basic commands that the user can copy and paste into R to perform a variety of
statistical analyses.
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