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*What is R?
The description on the main R web page is good, and needn’t be repeated here; it describes a bit about R’s history and technical capabilities. Some things you might want to know about R if you’re encountering it for the first time:
~R is (according to the description linked above) “a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics”; you can think of it as a combination of a statistics package and a programming language.
R is completely free; you don’t have to pay for it, and you can make any modifications you want to it
~R runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and many Unix variants
~R is not supported by any commercial enterprise, but it has a very active development community, and there are companies that offer training courses etc.. The manuals are complete (if not always helpful – one of the reasons for this Wiki) and there are many books on it.
~R has an enormous number of standard and cutting-edge statistical functions built in, a wide variety of (free) add-in packages that add even more functions, and you can extend it further. Every standard statistical analysis can be done in R.
~R is mostly command-line driven (although various graphical interfaces have been developed); this makes it harder to use but allows flexibility and documentation and repetition of analyses.
~People use R to analyze data in the fields (alphabetical order) of:
-agriculture
-astrophysics
-climatology
-ecology and environmental science
-econometrics
-electrical engineering
-finance
-genetics and genomics
-geography
-psychology
-social sciences
and many more.
~[[http://www.digistats.net/image/2008/12/button-cc.gif>http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/]]
