R in a Nutshell

R Versions

Today, R is maintained by a team of developers around the world. Usually, there is an official release of R twice a year, in April and in October. I used version 2.9.2 in this book. (Actually, it was 2.8.1 when I started writing the book and was updated three times while I was writing. I installed the updates, but they didn’t change very much content.)

R hasn’t changed that much in the past few years: usually there are some bug fixes, some optimizations, and a few new functions in each release. There have been some changes to the language, but most of these are related to somewhat obscure features that won’t affect most users. (For example, the type of NA values in incompletely initialized arrays was changed in R 2.5.) Don’t worry about using the exact version of R that I used in this book; any results you get should be very similar to the results shown in this book. If there are any changes to R that affect the examples in this book, I’ll try to add them to the official errata online.

Additionally, I’ve given some example filenames below for the current release. The filenames usually have the release number in them. So, don’t worry if you’re reading this book and don’t see a link for R-2.9.1-win32.exe, but see a link for R-3.0.1-win32.exe instead; just use the latest version, and you’ll be fine.