IcebreakeR

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. R is available as Free Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The R Foundation is a not for profit organization with the goal of supporting the continued development of R.

R is better than its commercial counterparts in many respects:

• Capability: No commercial package offers anywhere near the scope of functionality available through the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), a network of ftp and web servers around the world that store identical, up-to-date, versions of code and documentation for R.
• Community: The size of the community of R users is huge and ever growing and this embeds you in a cosy environment.
• Performance: If you have enough memory to load the data in memory, R efficiency is comparable or superior to most commercial alternatives.

R, however, is not the right tool for every problem. Do not write video games in R! R is not handy for preprocessing large files before using them in R. In general, R is not the most appropriate software to query and manipulate data that does not fit in main memory. Typically, one uses a database to store and query data on secondary memory and a programming language to preprocess the data in a format readable from R.

This is an ice breaking tutorial for R. More information in: R in a nutshell, by Joseph Adler (O'Reilly, 2010).

• R as a programming language



• R as a data manipulation language



• R as a language for statistical computing



• Fitting empirical distributions to theoretical models



• Playing with Google's PageRank