1 Introduction
1.1 What is R
These notes describe how to use R while learning introductory
statistics. The purpose is to allow this fine software to be used in
"lower-level" courses where often MINITAB, SPSS, Excel, etc. are
used. It is expected that the reader has had at least a pre-calculus
course. It is the hope, that students shown how to
use R at this early level will better understand the statistical
issues and will ultimately benefit from the more sophisticated
program despite its steeper ``learning curve''.
The benefits of R for an introductory student are
-
R is free. R is open-source and runs on UNIX, Windows
and Macintosh.
- R has an excellent built-in help system.
- R has excellent graphing capabilities.
- Students can easily migrate to the commercially supported S-Plus
program if commercial software is desired.
- R's language has a powerful, easy to learn syntax with many
built-in statistical functions.
- The language is easy to extend with user-written
functions.
- R is a computer programming language. For
programmers it will feel more familiar than others and for new
computer users, the next leap to programming will not be so large.
What is R lacking compared to other software solutions?
-
It has a limited graphical interface (S-Plus has a good
one). This means, it can be harder to learn at the outset.
- There is no commercial support. (Although one can argue the
international mailing list is even better)
- The command language is a programming language
so students must learn to appreciate syntax issues etc.
R is an open-source (GPL) statistical environment modeled after S
and S-Plus
(http://www.insightful.com). The
S language was developed in the late 1980s at AT&T labs.
The R project was started by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka 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
http://www.r-project.org
is the main site for information on R. At this site are directions
for obtaining the software, accompanying packages and other sources
of documentation.
1.2 A note on notation
A few typographical conventions are used in these notes. These
include different fonts for urls, R commands,
dataset names and
different typesetting for
longer sequences of R commands.
and for
Data sets.
Copyright © John Verzani, 2001-2. All rights reserved.