Chapter 1 What is R?

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According to the official webpage:

• 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. R can be considered as a different implementation of S. There are some important differences, but much code written for S runs unaltered under R. http://www.r-project.org/about.html

According to Wikipedia

• R is a free software programming language and a software environment for statistical computing and graphics. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. Polls and surveys of data miners are showing R’s popularity has increased substantially in recent years.

To Summarise

• R is the most amazing free statistical software ever!

• This recent video by Revolution Analytics does a great job in summarizing R

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