Re: How good is R?


John_Kane wrote:
> casioculture@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> > I'm investing my time in learning R, and also gnumeric. I guess
> > gnumeric is somewhat trivial, and so far I found R easy to learn. I
> > must say I'm spending most of my time relearning statistics itself. I
> > made the decision to do so as they're open source. I decided not to
> > learn SPSS and Excel, as I don't have SPSS and Excel is equally
> > proprietary, though I'm inclined to think that by understanding R and
> > being familiar with gnumeric, and the relevant statistics, then getting
> > to know SPSS and Excel if I encounter them somewhere should be no major
> > issue. Am I correct?
>
> I have not used SPSS in years and like you I am trying to teach myself
> R but as I remember SPSS, it is nothing like R.
>

Hello, would you elaborate please? Am I making the correct choice in
learning R and ignoring SPSS? If I master what I need of R would I miss
out on anything significant in SPSS?

> I have used Excel and played a bit with Gnumeric but not for
> statistics. I don't think you should ever consider using a spread***
> for statistics unless you have absolutely no choice and even then you
> might not want to use Excel. It has a fairly large number of known
> problems or inadequacies
>
> Here are a few links you might find useful
> http://www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jcryer/JSMTalk2001.pdf
> http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jsimonof/classes/1305/pdf/excelreg.pdf
> http://www.csdassn.org/reportdetail.cfm?ID=508
>
> >
> > Also, I know that gnumeric is more powerful than excel. How does R
> > compare to SPSS?

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