Kevin Goulding is working on a Master’s degree in Applied Economics at Montana State University, and offers 10 reasons why grad students should choose R for statistical analyses, homework problems, and thesis research:
- R is free, and lets grad students escape the burdens of commercial license costs.
- R has really good online documentation; and the community is unparalleled.
- The command-line interface is perfect for learning by doing.
- R is on the cutting edge, and expanding rapidly.
- The R programming language is intuitive.
- R creates stunning visuals.
- R and LaTeX work together — seamlessly.
- R is used by practitioners in a plethora of academic disciplines.
- R makes you think.
- There’s always more than one way to accomplish something.
Kevin offers provides further details for each of these points in his blog post. Grad students can also expand their use of R with the additional features of Revolution R Enterprise free of charge.
The Tarzan: Why use R? A grad student’s 2 cents
R and LaTeX might be seamless, but it still took me a good 3/4 of a day with google and by trial and error to get it working.
Posted by: jack | July 18, 2011 at 12:40