Greg Kochanski

Learning the R-language to do statistics

(This list is aimed at people who are neither statisticians nor expert programmers.)

An overview of R can be found at http://zoonek2.free.fr/UNIX/48_R/01.html . (Note that this isn't really a tutorial or a reference manual, but it points to a lot of R resources and also gives you an idea of what R is like and what it can do.) The remainder of Vincent Zoonekynd's Statistics with R are good, but too advanced for a beginner who's not a programmer and/or a statistician.

Two tutorials on basic R operations are http://kochanski.org/gpk/teaching/0601Oxford/sumstats.pdf and http://kochanski.org/gpk/teaching/0601Oxford/02Rdemo.pdf .

There is a good ``reminder sheet'' is at http://www.math.ilstu.edu/dhkim/Rstuff/Rtutor.html . It gives hundreds of one-line R examples; not much detail and explanation, but if you almost remember how to do something, it's a good place to look.

The standard book on R seems to be Introductory Statistics with R Peter Dalgaard, Springer (2002), ISBN 978-0-387-95475-2

For people who have never programmed before, there's a good introduction to the basic ideas that all real programmers take for granted at http://hetland.org/writing/instant-hacking.html . Unfortunately, it doesn't use R as an example language, so don't read for detail, just for the big picture.