R Wiki - Getting started

This section is dedicated to :N: ! People who never used R before should find valuable material here.

What is R? – A short explanation and a few examples of R’s potential
Case studies – People explain how and why they started to use R
Installation – All you need to know to install R and additional R packages
System setup – Set up for systems to work with R – editors, etc., for teaching, research, etc.
Reference cards – Brief overviews of tasks and associated commands
Translations (computer) – To and from other statistics packages and computer languages (SAS, S-Plus, SPSS, Stata, Octave or Matlab, Maxima)
Internationalization – R in other languages
FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions

Contribute!

Novices can also contribute to this Wiki, here is how:

Add a page in the case studies section and tell how you learn(ed) R, and what material was most useful for you; what were the difficulties and traps during your learning?

Add or contribute to a page in the translation section if you are an expert in another software (SAS, Stata, SPSS, Matlab, Octave, whatever,...) and share your experience on starting to learn and to use R with a different background. Especially appreciated: start an embryo of a conversion dictionary (foreign language function -> R).

Start a topic on a point you find hard during your learning curve. This place is dedicated to novices, meaning that topics that are trivial for other, more experienced, people are perfectly acceptable here. Then, dwell into the R documentation and try to propose at least a part of the solution by yourself (it is very important to try to solve a problem by yourself before asking to experts!). If you are completely stuck, it could help to ask the R-Help mailing list (see http://www.r-project.org/mail.html), pointing on the Wiki page you just created to encourage others to edit it (Please, read posting guide to the R-Help mailing list first!).

Any other topic that could be useful to share with other novices to help them is welcome!