What is R? Possibly a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics but eventually R is much more. R is the result of the concerted efforts of many scientists from a wide variety of fields all of them truly convinced that the open source model could be a better way for deploying ideas and knowledge to a large community.
The R Foundation is a not for profit organization working in the public interest. It has been founded by the members of the R Development Core Team in order to provide support for the R project and other innovations in statistical computing.
The R Foundation believes that R has become a mature and valuable tool and they would like to ensure its continued development and the development of future innovations in software for statistical and computational research.
Provide a reference point for individuals, institutions or commercial enterprises that want to support or interact with the R development community.
The R Foundation holds and administers the copyright of R software and documentation.
R is an official part of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU project, and the R Foundation has similar goals to other open source software foundations.
Among the goals of the R Foundation are the support of continued development of R, the exploration of new methodology, teaching and training of statistical computing and the organization of meetings and conferences with a statistical computing orientation.
The R Foundation, hopes to attract sufficient funding to make these goals realities.
Furthermore, R is a stimulating environment where ideas can be easily prototyped into software.
The first part of this manual deeply explores three key concepts of the R world: environments, functions and packages.
The second part examines the double nature of R both as functional and object oriented programming language.
The third part illustrates some tools to improve the efficiency and speed of our coding: debugging, profiling, parallel computation and Rcpp.
