As an open-source project, the R source code has always been available to download from the R-project website. You can find source code for the latest released version here, and for the changing-daily new version in progress (R-devel) here. But if you don't have the R sources handy, and just ... [Read more...]

If you're writing C++ code and want to generate random numbers, you might not be aware that R provides an API to call the R RNG functionality directly. The Rcpp package's "syntactic sugar" feature makes this process easier, by automating the process of translating a subset of ordinary R code ... [Read more...]

Most of the time when we're programming in R, we don't think about how R gets from an object name (say, "stdev") to what it represents (a function to calculate standard deviation, perhaps). If you're writing functions, you've probably know about R's lexical scoping. And if you use a lot ... [Read more...]

The RInside package provides C++ classes that make it easier to embed R in C++ code on many platforms. According to a post from package co-maintainer Dirk Eddelbuettel, the package has just been updated to version 0.2.6 with improved support on Windows, and compatibility with R's standard random number generator. You ... [Read more...]

Patrick Burns' informative and entertaining books for R programmers, 'S Poetry' and 'The R Inferno', which have long been available as free downloads, are now available in an attractive hardcover format from Lulu Press and are on 25% sale through the end of January (use discount code LULUBOOKUK305). 'S Poetry', although ... [Read more...]

MapReduce is a powerful programming framework for efficiently processing very large amounts of data stored in the Hadoop distributed filesystem. But while several programming frameworks for Hadoop exist, few are tuned to the needs of data analysts who typically work in the R environment as opposed to general-purpose languages like ... [Read more...]

On of the nice things about R is that a lot if it is written in the R language. That means, as an R user, if you want to see how R calculates a certain statistic, or you want to modify an existing function for your own use, you can ... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics is hosting several hands-on R training classes over the next few months, with in-person instruction from two leading package authors and experts from the R community. Diethelm Würtz from ETH Zurich will give a two-day master class on Portfolio Selection and Optimization in Practice. Prof Würtz ... [Read more...]

The latest issue of the R Journal is out, and as always includes many useful articles about using R and R packages. Articles in Volume 3/1 dive into topics including creating test for R packages with test_that; dealing with times, time zones, dates and holidays with timeDate; social network analysis ... [Read more...]

From his presentation at the Greater Boston useR Group[*], R user Jeffrey Breen has shared some useful slides detailing how to bring data from relational databases like MySQL and Oracle. In fact, data from just about any relational database is accessible from R by sending an SQL query to the ... [Read more...]

John Chambers, one of the creators of R's predecessor S and a current member of the R Core Group, gave a seminar at Stanford last week titled "R, other languages and object-oriented programming". Unfortunately, I was away for the Thanksgiving break and couldn't make it myself, but John has kindly ... [Read more...]

If you have some R code to include in a document, especially a Web-based document like a blog post, the new "Pretty R" feature on inside-R.org can help you make it look its best. Given some raw R code, it will create a HTML version of the code, adding ... [Read more...]

As noted on the Google Open Source Blog last week, R package authors Dirk Eddelbuettel and Romain Francois recently gave a presentation on R at the Googleplex, on various topic related to "bridging" R into other systems. Their 90-minute talk is available for replay on YouTube (as part of the ... [Read more...]

Writing an R script is one thing. Organizing your process: where to put the data, how to refer to files in scripts, how to run the scripts, and how to produce and collect and report the results; that's quite another. Every R user has their own workflow for doing data ... [Read more...]

R is designed to make it easy to clearly express statistical ideas in code, but when it come to writing code that runs as fast as possible, there are a few tips, tricks and caveats to be aware of. As part of the BioConductor conference this past summer, Martin Morgan ... [Read more...]

In a two-part series at the Los Angeles R User Group[*], Ryan Rosario took a look at the many ways you can take the R language to the limits of high-performance computing. In Part I (see video at this link; slides and code also available), Ryan focuses on the various ... [Read more...]

Revolution Analytics is proud to sponsor the New York R User Group. The last meeting was on the theme of debugging in R, and some videos of the talks are now available at the Video Rchive. Jay Emerson have a talk on Basic debugging in R and Harlan Harris dived ... [Read more...]

Let's face it: you can do some pretty awesome things with R -- statistical models, beautiful charts, you name it -- but if the only way to do those things is from the R command line you're limiting the audience of people who might make use of all this awesomeness ... [Read more...]

Tuesday's meeting of the Bay Area R UseR Group at the LinkedIn offices was a great event. The headline speaker was Joe Adler, author of the excellent R reference manual, R in a Nutshell. Joe's presentation was an in-depth look at the relative speed of various options in R for ... [Read more...]

On his Psychology and Statistics blog, Jeromy Anglim tells how he was analyzing some data from a skill acquisition experiment. Needing to run a custom R function across 1.3 million data points, Jeromy estimated it would take several hours for the computation to complete. So, Jeromy set out to optimise the ... [Read more...]