R is hot. Whether measured by more than 10,000 add-on packages, the 95,000+ members of LinkedIn’s R group or the more than 400 R Meetup groups currently in existence, there can be little doubt that interest in the R statistics language, especially for data analysis, is soaring. Why R? It’s free, open source, powerful and highly extensible. “You have a lot of prepackaged stuff that’s already avail