Venables W., Smith D. An Introduction to R

This introduction to R is derived from an original set of notes describing the S and SPlus environments written in 1990–2 by Bill Venables and David M. Smith when at the University of Adelaide. We have made a number of small changes to reflect differences between the R and S programs, and expanded some of the material.
We would like to extend warm thanks to Bill Venables (and David Smith) for granting permission to distribute this modified version of the notes in this way, and for being a supporter of R from way back.
This manual provides a comprehensive introduction to R, a software package for statistical computing and graphics. R supports a wide range of statistical techniques, and is easily extensible via user-defined functions written in its own language, or using dynamically loaded modules written in C, C++ or Fortran. One of R's strengths is the ease with which well-designed publication-quality plots can be produced.