Introduction

At the time of drafting up this handbook, the latest version of R is R-1.6.0. Therefore it is assumed that users will have R-1.6.0 or later installed. There are already many sources of documentation on how to do statistics in R, for example, John Verzani's Simple R athttp://www.math.csi.cuny.edu/Statistics/R/simpleR. Therefore in this handbook I will not attempt to explain how to do statistics, but rather I will go through some general areas, such as installing R on Windows (which is actually very straight forward), basic use (such as how to invoke R), compile R from source, and compile R packages...and so on. In addition, when I wrote this handbook, I tried to word in a way that it can be understood by people are experienced Windows users, but have not used R much before; and people who are experienced Mac or UNIX users who may or may not have lots of experience with R, but need to use R under Windows in some (perhaps unfortunate) situations. Anyone may copy, print, or re-distribute this article, provided it is for non-commercial purposes. Any comments, positive or negative, may be sent to kwan022@stat.auckland.ac.nz
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