Today, R is maintained by a team of developers around the world. Usually, there is an official release of R twice a year, in April and in October. I’ve checked the code in this book against 2.15.1, but if you have an earlier or later version of R installed, don’t worry.
R hasn’t changed that much in the past few years: usually there are
some bug fixes, some optimizations, and a few new functions in each
release. There have been some changes to the language, but most of these
are related to somewhat obscure features that won’t affect most users.
(For example, the type of NA values in
incompletely initialized arrays was changed in R 2.5.) Don’t worry about
using the exact version of R that I used in this book; any results you get
should be very similar to the results shown in this book. If there are any
changes to R that affect the examples in this book, I’ll try to add them
to the official errata online.
Additionally, I’ve given some example filenames below for the current release. The filenames usually have the release number in them. So don’t worry if you’re reading this book and don’t see a link for R-2.15.1-win32.exe but see a link for R-2.73.5-win32.exe instead; just use the latest version and you should be fine.
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