Coming to R from SQL, Python, SAS, Matlab, or Lisp

The theme of last week's meetup of the New York R User Group was The R Rosetta Stone and focused on translating between R and other data languages: SAS, Matlab, SQL, Python and Clojure. I really wish I'd been there, because it's a great topic -- one of the best ways to get started with R is to bootstrap your knowledge of other statistical applications. Thankfully though, the speakers made their slides available for download at the meetup.com site (I converted a couple of them to PDF for those without access to PowerPoint). 

• SAS: Bringing the SAS legacy into an R environment (Georgette Ackerman): PPT Slides and scripts, PDF Slides
• Matlab: Matlab/R Dictionary (Harlan Harris and Marck Vaisman): PPT Slides and PDF Slides
• SQL: Data munging with SQL and R (Josh Reich): PDF Slides
• Clojure: From Lisp to Clojure-Incanter and R (Shane Conway): PDF Slides
• Python: Learning R Via Python (or the other way around) (Drew Conway): PDF Slides

Thanks to the NY UseR Group for putting together such a great session, and thanks to the speakers for sharing their slides.

New York R User Group: Files

Comments

[anthony damico]

hi, i wrote an r journal article on this topic: transitioning to r from sas, stata, and sudaan -- the examples i use are health policy statistics.. but it's perfectly relevant to this material :)

http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2009-2/2009-2_index.html

[Christian Gunning]

I often turn up my nose at all the poor folks stuck using closed-source SAS, matlab, etc. Just this week, though, I found myself with stuck with SPSS command files.

I was trying to get census microdata into R. They distribute fixed-width data files and separate command files for reading the data for Stata, SAS, and SPSS. Commence google hunt. I stumbled across PSPP, the GNU version of SPSS. This gave me an open-source tool that allowed me to save my data as an SPSS data file, then read it into R with via read.spss (in package foreign).

Diversity saves the day!

[Christian Gunning]

Census microdata is at http://usa.ipums.org/usa/, incidentally.

[Alex Singleton]

As a SAS user recently taking up R I found http://www.statmethods.net/ invaluable - it is a really great site for the basics.

[Ken Kleinman]

I don't often self-promote, but for general users, a book I wrote with Nick Horton is effectively a meshed set of documentation for SAS and R. It can be a big help in transitioning if your investment in SAS is deep. See http://www.math.smith.edu/sasr for our book's home page and http://sas-and-r.blogspot.com/ for a blog with examples worked in SAS and R.