The R Book

Online Help

The is a tremendous amount of information about R on the web, but your first port of call is likely to be CRAN at

http://cran.r-project.org/

Here you will find a variety of R manuals:

• An Introduction to R gives an introduction to the language and how to use R for doing statistical analysis and graphics.
• A draft of the R Language Definition documents the language per se – that is, the objects that it works on, and the details of the expression evaluation process, which are useful to know when programming R functions.
• Writing R Extensions covers how to create your own packages, write R help files, and use the foreign language (C, C++, Fortran, ...) interfaces.
• R Data Import/Export describes the import and export facilities available either in R itself or via packages which are available from CRAN.
• R Installation and Administration, which is self-explanatory.
• R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing (referred to on the website as ‘The R Reference Index’) contains all the help files of the R standard and recommended packages in printable form.

(These manuals are also available in R itself by choosing Help/Manuals (in PDF) from the menu bar.) There are also answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and R News, a newsletter which contains interesting articles, book reviews and news of forthcoming releases. The most useful part of the site, however, is the Search facility which allows you to investigate the contents of most of the R documents, functions, ...