The R Inferno

An essential guide to the trouble spots and oddities of R. In spite of the quirks exposed here, R is the best computing environment for most data analysis tasks. R is free, open-source, and has thousands of contributed packages. It is used in such diverse fields as ecology, finance, genomics and music. If you are using spreadsheets to understand data, switch to R. You will have safer -- and ultimately, more convenient -- computations.