If you currently use another statistical package, why learn R? It's free! If you are a teacher or a student, the benefits are obvious. It runs on a variety of platforms including Windows, Unix and MacOS. It provides an unparalleled platform for programming new statistical methods in an easy and straightforward manner. It contains advanced statistical routines not yet available in other packages. It has state-of-the-art graphics capabilities.

Draw on the talents of data scientists worldwide As a thriving open-source project, R is supported by a community of more than 2 million users and thousands of developers worldwide. Whether you’re using R to optimize portfolios, analyze genomic sequences, or to predict component failure times, experts in every domain have made resources, applications and code available for free, online.