Introduction to S

Albyn Jones

R and Splus (hereafter generically referred to as S) are versions of a powerful, interactive statistical system with excellent graphics facilities. This handout is only a brief introduction to S; for more detailed information consult one of the following texts

1. The New S Language: A Programming Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics by Becker, Chambers, and Wilks
2. Statistical Models in S, by Chambers and Hastie
3. Modern Applied Statistics with S-plus, Venables and Ripley.

There is a version of R for Macintosh machines, which you can find on the hard drive of the Mac's in L18, and those in the IRC's with the tower (as opposed to pizza-box) structure. It should be in the Classroom, in a folder labeled rm130_FULL. In that folder you will find the R program folder. Splus lives on the unix machines (Oberon and Puck). Those of you who are unix fans are welcome to use that version of S. From the Mac's you need to use Exodus to log in to one of the unix machines.

• Beginning an S Session in Unix
• Recording your S Session in Unix
• On-line Documentation
• Data in S
• Arithmetic and Logical Operators
• Subsets of data vectors
• Functions
• Basic Graphics
• Data Structures
• Writing Functions in S