Right. I briefly used R for research while I was in school. It was definitely a valuable tool for generating sets of random numbers, doing some statistical op

Right. I briefly used R for research while I was in school. It was definitely a valuable tool for generating sets of random numbers, doing some statistical operations on them (PCA and SVD if you must know), and outputting them to a file that I could then pipe to my C program. It was a good example of doing one thing and doing it [pretty] well. That said, I only learned enough of R to get it to do what I wanted. The help in the interactive mode was all I really had to go off of then, and that was very helpful with plenty of examples. Being a relatively uncommon, single-letter language name, google wasn't giving me anything useful at the time. I see that is now much improved now, but this tutorial - mapping it to other languages and explaining syntax gotchas - would have saved me several hours of ramp-up for the simple tasks I wanted to accomplish.