Rrrrrrrr

After doing a fresh install of OSX Leopard on my Mac and having to re-familiarize with some of my Biostatistics/Microarray education background it was time do a fresh install of R on my machine.

R is a freely available statistical programming language modeled after S programming language. Matthew Keller, a founder of the Richmond R group describes some of R's advantages over other statistical packages as the following:

• Its fast and free


• State of the art: Researchers provide their methods as R packages


• Its second only to MATLAB for graphics

Some points that I would like to add to the list are:

• Its graphs and tables can be used with the ever popular LaTeX


• Its programming/scripting like interface makes it rather extensible


• Its a great starting point for people interested in Biostatistics and Microarrays


• The BioConductor project is primarily based on R


• Did I mention that its free?

R is a rather powerful tool and I consider it to be a must have for any Biostatistician or Bioinformatician's toolset. So check it out, and let me know what you think.

Other Important R Links:

• CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network (similar to perl's CPAN)


• The R Help Mailing List a good place for getting answers to R related questions


• R Seek, a useful tool as google isn't designed to just search for "R"