Recently I've had the opportunity to revisit R on a few occasions and am more impressed. The only caveat being it is probably more than a few minutes to get familiar with it unless you can find a canned script or tutorial that does exactly what you want. There are a number of books on the subject and I've picked up a few in the last 2 months. They are: * Data Mining with R: Learning with Case Studies * ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Use R!) * The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design * Applied Bayesian Statistics: With R and OpenBUGS Examples Each of them has pros and cons mostly due to the level of statistical knowledge involved. I think that the Bayesian book has been beyond my needs and it is a big expensive. The others are good in different ways. I will eventually post a few examples of some of what I've been using R for but the main thing is that if you need to do data analysis I recommend giving R a try before you buy something expensive.