Monthly Archive for July, 2007

R is a very good open-source statistical package. It has a built-in help system which documents all functions currently available. This is nice once you know the name of the function adapted to your particular need. Yet, very often, you know what you want to do with your data but don’t know how to do it in R. Since “Google is [usually] your friend”, you take your browser on a cruise to search for the name of the particular function or package which implements your needs (and it has got to be somewhere, there are so many of them!). Unfortunately, R’s name (chosen from its predecessor, the S language) is not exactly Google friendly: adding the letter “r” to your search keywords does not help much in focusing results. Depending on the other keywords in your search, you will usually get a few nice results between loads of garbage and piles of crap. Those few nice results are most often messages on R-help mailing list. So, why not get information directly at the source?

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