Statistical Programming With R
An anonymous reader writes "This series introduces you to R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. It includes a programming language, an interactive shell, and extensive graphing capability. What's more, R comes with a spectacular collection of functions for mathematical and statistical manipulations -- with still more capabilities available in optional packages."
I've heard good things about R, but have never really got to grips with it (although I know it has been around for a while), so any kind of primer is more than welcome as far as I'm concerned.
We have a few people using R around here, mainly in the backend of cgis to produce graphs of various things. The main problem? If you want to output to a jpg or png (like, to display the result in a webpage), R has to create a window in X, draw onto the window, and then take a snapshot of the window. What this means on a headless sun machine? We get to run a virtual X server soley for our R cgis. Bloody hell, it's a stupid implementation of a crappy language.
</cranky old man>