Lam L. An introduction to R

While the commercial implementation of S, S-PLUS, is struggling to keep its existing users, the open-source version of S, R, has received a lot of attention in the last _ve years. Not only because the R system is a free tool, the system has proven to be a very e_ective tool in data manipulation, data analysis, graphing and developing new functionality. The user community has grown enormously the last years, and it is an active user community writing new R packages that are made available to others. If you have any questions or comments on this document please do not hesitate to contact me.The remainder of this section and the following section are taken from the R web site.