Introduce your friends to R

R has gotten quite a lot of exposure recently. It started with the feature article in the New York Times last January, but since then there's been a steady flow of articles about R in analyst reports, on blogs, in YouTube videos, on Twitter, as well as in the general news media. As a result, a lot of new people have heard about R, but not all of them may know exactly what R is, or where it came from, or what they can do with it.

To address that, I'm hosting a public webinar on Thursday next week (January 28, at 9AM US Pacific time). The title of the talk is "The R Project: Data Analysis and Statistical Graphics for the Enterprise", and in 30 minutes I'll attempt to explain just how awesome R is as a statistical tool, especially compared to commercial tools like SAS, SPSS or Excel. I'll be focussing mostly on applications of R, i.e. what you can do with it, rather than how you do it. If you have friends or colleagues who should be using R, but aren't, send 'em along (just sent them the link below). And if you already know what R is all about, you might just find some new uses for R you hadn't thought of yet. 

REvolution Computing: The R Project: Data Analysis and Statistical Graphics for the Enterprise 

Comments

[Ian Fellows]

Since you are comparing R to SPSS and Excel, may I (self-servingly) point out the package Deducer (http://www.deducer.org/manual.html), which provides an easy to use data analysis GUI for R. Many of the dialogs were inspired by their SPSS counterparts.

[Tal Galili]

Thank you for the link David,
And good luck with the webinar.

[Jose C Silva]

If its feasible, would you consider recording the webinar and posting it on a video site?

Cheers,

JCS

[Ken Williams]

Seconded - if you could post a recording of the webinar I'd be very interested in showing it to my group in the next couple of weeks.

[David Smith]

We will be posting a recording of the webinar on the REvolution website ASAP after the live event. To be notified when it's available, just sign up for the webinar (even if you know you can't make the live one).