Blog post: ajb: Learning R

<table border="0"><br /><tbody><br /><tr><br /><td style="vertical-align: top"><br /><p>I have decided to improve my computer skills and in particular learn a little R.</p></td><br /><td><img src="http://www.r-project.org/Rlogo.jpg" alt="R" width="120" /></td><br /></tr><br /></tbody><br /></table><br /><br /><br /><blockquote>R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. </blockquote><a href="http://www.r-project.org/about.html" title="R about" target="_blank">http://www.r-project.org/about.html<br /></a><br /><br /><p>This sounds great. According to the R website, <em>R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display</em>. What makes R useful to me is the fact that it is a programming language (conditionals, loops, recursive functions etc) with built-in operators for calculations with matrices. </p><br /><br /><p>Other people like R for its data handling and analysis tools. </p><br /><br /><p><strong>Some graphics</strong></p><br /><p>Among other things, R is quite good with graphics. Look at this example taken from the R website.</p><br /><br /><br /><img src="http://www.r-project.org/screenshots/volcano-image.jpg" alt="volcano" /><br /><br /><img src="http://www.r-project.org/screenshots/volcano-persp.jpg" alt="volcano2" /><br /><br /><p><strong>RStudio</strong></p><br /><p>Along side R, I will be using RStudio.</p><br /><br /><br /><br /><blockquote>RStudio is a free and open source integrated development environment for R. You can run it on your desktop (Windows, Mac, or Linux) or even over the web using RStudio Server. </blockquote><a href="http://www.rstudio.com/ide/" title="RStudio" target="_blank">http://www.rstudio.com/ide/</a><br /><br /><p><strong>My Plans</strong></p><br /><p>So, learning R is going to be a weekend project for fun, rather than a serious project. As I manage to develop some code, hopefully with some nice graphics, I will post them here. I imagine a lot of the code will be adapted from peoples existing codes and I will try to give credit as best I can. </p><br /><br /><p>If you know of any good resources to help me learn R, then please feel free to share them here. As I find useful websites I will link to them.</p><br /><br /><p><strong>Links</strong></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.r-project.org/" title="R" target="_blank">The R Project for Statistical Computing</a></p><br /><br /><p><a href="http://www.rstudio.com/ide/" title="RStudio" target="_blank">RStudio IDE</a></p><br /><br/><a href="http://blogs.scienceforums.net/ajb/?p=2646">Read and comment on the full post</a>