University of Minnesota, Twin Cities School of Statistics Stat 3011 Rweb Textbook (Wild and Seber)
We will be using computers in the course. The default statistical computing package will be R and its web interface Rweb, which can be used in any web browser. If you are familiar with another computer statistics package, you may use that, but the instructor and teaching assistant may not be able to help you with it.
R is a general purpose computing language designed especially for statistics. You can do any computational problem in R, but what it is really good at is statistics.
R is free software (both free as in "free beer" and free as in "free speech"). If you want to use it at home, you can download it from CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network). It is available for Microsoft Windows and all versions of UNIX (including Linux). Unfortunately, the Macintosh port seems moribund. You do not have to download it if you don't want to. R is installed in the computers in the lab (Room B53, Ford Hall), and R can be used over the web on any computer that runs a web browser (see the section on Rweb).
The textbook describes using R to do all the statistics it covers. The textbook also describes three other software packages, S-plus (which is a proprietary package very similar to R), Minitab, which is a proprietary package, quite different from R, and Microsoft Excel (a spreadsheet program).
We do not insist that you use R (or Rweb), but we will only teach the use of R (and Rweb) in the lecture and labs. If you already know some other package and think you can use it for homework and tests, go ahead (though perhaps you should discuss it with the instructor).
Because R is free software, it can be made to run over the web. To try it out, go to the web page we have made especially for using Rweb in this course, and try the example at the bottom of the page. Note that this link is on the menu at the top of most of the course web pages.
There is another Rweb page for general use, but we won't use that.