R (the pirate's language...if he was a statistician)
R is an open source statistical programming language. It has a wide variety of powerful libraries that are simple to download and plug into your analytics code. The packages are developed and maintained by a large community of statisticians and data scientists. It is very powerful and is continuously enhanced with new packages, which are released frequently.
Installing R and RStudio
If you do not have R, install the latest version from https://cran.rstudio.com/. Then, install RStudio, an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for R, from https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/. Both are open source and free to download and use. RStudio is managed by the RStudio company, based in Boston, which also offers paid support and an enterprise version of the software.
Using R for statistical analysis
For this example, we will use the datasets package, which has a wide variety of sample datasets. In RStudio, use the Packages
tab to verify...