Spatial-Analysis. Business-Intelligence. R course - Michael Lachmann. Introduction to Statistical Computing in R. A statistical package, such as SPSS or SAS, is primarily oriented toward combining instructions with rectangular case-by-variable datasets to produce (often voluminous) printouts.
Such packages make routine data analysis relatively easy, but they make it relatively difficult to do things that are innovative or non-standard, or to add to the built-in capabilities of the package. In contrast, a good statistical computing environment also makes routine data analysis easy, but it additionally supports convenient programming; this means that users can extend the already impressive facilities of R. Statisticians and others have taken advantage of the extensibility of R to contribute more than 2000 freely available “packages” of documented R programs and data to CRAN ( the Comprehensive R Archive Network) and many others to the Bioconductor package archive.
R course notes.