I have decided to improve my computer skills and in particular learn a little R.
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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.
http://www.r-project.org/about.html
This sounds great. According to the R website, R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display. 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.
Other people like R for its data handling and analysis tools.
Some graphics
Among other things, R is quite good with graphics. Look at this example taken from the R website.
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RStudio
Along side R, I will be using RStudio.
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.
http://www.rstudio.com/ide/
My Plans
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.
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.
Links
The R Project for Statistical Computing
RStudio IDE