R in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chapter 17. Probability Distributions

Many statistical tests work by calculating a test statistic and then comparing the test statistic to a value from a theoretical distribution. R provides a set of functions to calculate densities, distributions, and quantiles for common statistical distributions. You can also generate random values from these distributions. This section describes how to use these functions (using the normal distribution as an example) and then lists most functions included with the R stats library.