In LUMC/rcourse: R Open Online Course (ROOC)

Why this course?

Modern science requires modern statistical methods:

Genomics/bioinformatics
Advanced survival analysis
Causal modelling
...

Statisticians develop new methods and often make them first available as packages in R.
No need to wait until these methods are programmed into SPSS.

What is R?

A short history

S was a programming language for statistics developed by John Chambers (Bell Labs) in the 1970s-80s.
It had two primary implementations:

S-plus (1988, commercial);
R (1993, GNU public license) by Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka (Univ. of Auckland).

Now R is known as "a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics."

R

Current R developments are streamlined by non-profit organisation The R Project for Statistical Computing at https://www.r-project.org/.

The project supports a large and continuously growing community of users and package developers:

volunteer work (mostly by academics);
anyone can see the source code;
anyone can contribute (write code, report bugs, write documentation).

CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) at https://cloud.r-project.org/ is a central repository for R language interpreter and R packages.
It also contains manuals and mailing lists (well indexed on google).
Free download. New major version every year, minor versions in between.