I spent about a year blogging about R as I learned it (http://www.r-chart.com/ http://www.r-chart.com/). It is not a general purpose sort of language but is gr

I spent about a year blogging about R as I learned it (http://www.r-chart.com/ http://www.r-chart.com/). It is not a general purpose sort of language but is great for math / charting tasks. A couple of ways that software developer types can minimize time to get up and running: 1) Check out http://www.r-bloggers.com/ http://www.r-bloggers.com/. The site gives you a good sense of the state of R and Tal (who runs the site) has done a great job of promoting R and encouraging the community. 2) Pick one graphics package and stick with it. The standard functions are sufficient but ggplot2 has a more finished appearance. 3) Review available libraries. If you want to do something, someone else likely already has and has posted a package to CRAN. 4) One way for SQL developers to limit the need of learning the idiosyncrasies of the language is to use the sqldf package to manipulate data frames and use ggplot2 (which generally takes data frames as arguments) to display charts.