Article appearing in Shiken 16.2 (Nov 2012) pp. 21-29.
Author: Aaron Batty
SRB General Editor
Introduction:
Many readers of SRB are likely familiar with the free, open-source statistical software package R. R offers a staggeringly wide range of analyses and outputs, besting every other general statistics package on the market, for free. This value, however, comes at a cost that may seem too steep for many users: it is command-line only. One must learn to write R code to take advantage of this software, and although the code itself is relatively memorable and intuitive, it cannot compete with the ease of use offered by the graphical user interfaces (GUIs) of competing packages, such as SPSS/PASW -- a software package whose price can run over a thousand US dollars.