ABSTRACT
R is distinctively a programming language for statistics, data mining, and also bioinformatics. It differs from many other programming languages in its heavy emphasis of the statistical functionality. There are some other languages, such as Python, that offer comprehensive computational and statistical functions, but R has a special role in the community, because it sees many of the bleeding edge developments before other languages. In the field of statistics, R can be somewhat compared with,
for example, SAS and Stata, both containing a programming or scripting language with which the analyses are performed. For the basic statistical or bioinformatics work, the knowledge of all the programming nuances of the R language is not needed, and one can perform the analyses successfully (to some extent) just by getting to know the most commonly used functions. However, delving deeper into the language will help with the more difficult analyses or with the various data manipulation steps that can sometimes get rather complex.
