There are three main kinds of statistics program available at UEA. The are
SPSS - a program supported by the ITSC. It was designed to support the kinds of data
analysis that you might meed in the social sciences. It is _ne for routine analysis.
Stata - a complete, integrated statistical package which is popular amongst medics.
R which is (almost) a free clone of Splus, a program which implements the S language, see Becker and Chambers (1981).
In what follows we aim to get you up and running with R. We will not be teaching you statistics or the details of Lisp, our aim is to get you some way along the learning curve so that you can start to use R for your own analysis.
R is used by statistics departments and researchers around the world because it is an open source implementation of Splus. It allows the user to be exible in their analysis and is much more up to date than SPSS. It has extensive and powerful graphics abilities, that are tightly linked with its analytic abilities. R is also developing rapidly and new features and abilities appear every few months. It is available on most machines at UEA and you can download your own copy to run on a personal machine.
