R

R

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The R statistics environment and programming language is an exceptionally well engineered, free (as in free speech) and free (as in free beer) platform for data manipulation and analysis. The number of functions that are included by default is large, there is a very large number of additional, community-generated analysis modules that can be simply imported from dedicated sites (e.g. the Bioconductor package for molecular biology data), or via the CRAN network, and whatever function is not available can be easily programmed. Being able to filter and manipulate data through programming to prepare it for analysis is an absolute requirement in research-centric fields such as ours, where the strategies for analysis are constantly shifting and prepackaged solutions become obsolete almost faster than they can be developed. Besides numerical analysis, R has very powerful and flexible functions for plotting graphical output. (R project homepage)

Introductory reading

Wikipedia article on the R statistics environment and programming language

Further reading and resources