Morrrrrrrrrre R

Kevin Connolly, author of the terrific Excel plot on language learning, has just send me a link to a MetaFilter page, Rrrrrgh, with many links previously unknown to me. There's Kickstarting R from Jim Lemon on the R site:

Kickstarting R was initially compiled to help new users by requesting accounts of "... things that drove you crazy the first time you used R"....

Concluding that most of the introductions for beginners cover this well,

I decided to concentrate on providing a few solutions for tasks that new users would be likely to face. The reader I have in mind is one who has just installed R and is asked to produce the usual listing of descriptive stats and plots from a data file that is in an arbitrary format. A simple job, if you already know how to use R. I hope that this revision will be even better at helping new users get started.

So for readers who have some data and have been wondering whether they could use R to play around with it, this could be just the ticket.

There's Revolutions (a blog with "news about R, statistics, and the world of open source from the staff of REvolution Computing"). There's the blog OneRTipaDay. And many many more. (Also a link to RSeek.org, a customized version of Google for those who want to search for R-related sites; typing "R" into the vanilla Google search field produces, as you can probably imagine, mixed results.)

Checking out OneRTipaDay, I discover that the NYT actually ran a piece on R back in January (how did I miss this?) - a piece with photos of Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka, who released the first version of R back in 1996. The whole thing here.

Thanks, Kevin!