Introduction to S

Albyn Jones

Splus (hereafter S) is a powerful, interactive statistical system with excellent graphics facilities that lives on UNIX workstations. It is also available on DOS machines, but I'll say no more about that). This handout is only a brief introduction to S; for more detailed information consult one of the following texts

1. The New S Language: A Programming Environment for Data Analysis and Graphics by Becker, Chambers, and Wilks
2. Statistical Models in S, by Chambers and Hastie
3. Modern Applied Statistics with S-plus, Venables and Ripley.

If you are not familiar with UNIX you will find the material in the Reed Student Computing Handbook Volume II: UNIX helpful. You will need to know how to log in to one of the UNIX workstations, a little bit about directories and files in UNIX, and how to use an editor such as emacs, or pico. If you are on a PowerMac, you can access S by way of eXodus which lives in the communications folder.

 
• Beginning an S Session
• Recording your S Session
• On-line Documentation
• Data in S
• Arithmetic and Logical Operators
• Subsets of data vectors
• Functions
• Basic Graphics
• Data Structures
• Writing Functions in S