Free Statistics

R

R was born as a derivation of the commercial software S, or, to be more exact, being the most part of the source code of R identical to the S one , R can be defined as a different implementation of S. R was initially written by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka of the Statistics Department of the University of Auckland. (who were part also of the S project ) , then a large team (called Cran) was born, which supports his continued devolepment.

R is available as Free Software under the terms of the Gnu license, and you can download it freely by Cran archive (but a lot of mirrors exist ), and it runs on a wide variety of Unix platforms and similar systems (including FreeBSD and Linux), Windows and MacOS.
The main features of R are:
1) An effective data handling and storage facility
2) A suite of operators for calculations on arrays, in particular matrices
3) A large, coherent, integrated collection of intermediate tools for data analysis
4) Graphical facilities for data analysis and display either on-screen or on hardcopy
5) A well-developed, simple and effective programming language which includes conditionals, loops, diuser-defined recursive functions and input and output facilities.

R is a highly extensible software, thanks to the implementation of external packages (besides the eight which are included in the base distribution) provided by people who contribute to the development of this project. In the base distribution of R the main part of the documentation is already included (in particular the introduction to R) to learn using the software. On the R website there are additional links to translations of this documentation.
R is a software surely useful in statistical courses, but it can be also considered as a fundamental software in the research, thanks to his capability to process a large amount of data, to draw excellent graphs, and to create internal personalized functions.
In reference to the way of working in R, it has a Gui interface based on command line input, with a top windows-style menu to select the main functions about the software and the files (open,close,save...).

Compare R with other free software Go to R website Back to Free Statistical Software