R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is an implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme.

R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is an implementation of the S programming language combined with lexical scoping semantics inspired by Scheme. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman and is now developed by the R Development Core Team. It is easily extended through a packaging system on CRAN.

Official documentation from CRAN

  • An Introduction to R PDF HTML - A basic introduction for beginners.
  • The R Language Definition PDF HTML - A more technical discussion of the R language itself.
  • Writing R Extensions PDF HTML - Guide to writing packages for R, help files and foreign language interfaces.
  • R Data Import/Export PDF HTML - Guide to importing/exporting data in R in various formats.
  • R Installation PDF HTML - Guide to installing R from source.
  • R Internals PDF HTML - Outlines R's internal structures and coding guidelines for the R Core Team.

Other free resources

  • The R Inferno (Patrick Burns) PDF
  • R by example
  • CRAN maintains an extensive list of free contributed documentation in a range of languages.

Other Resources:

Syntax Highlighting

If your question or answer contains R code, you can enable syntax highlighting by doing the following:

<!-- language: lang-r -->

    R code goes here

For example, here's how this works on a “Hello, world!” program:

# A "Hello, world!" program.
hello <- function() {
    sprintf( "Hello, world!");
}

See here for a more detailed overview of syntax highlighting on Stack Exchange.

Frequently asked questions:

R FAQ - Official list of R FAQs on CRAN