I need to do some simple statistical analysis of data extracted from log files and decided to use my old friend R. R is a (free) cool tool meant for analysis and graphing. Since I’m a Mac fanboy nowadays I decided to use http://www.rstudio.com/ which puts a gui in front of R. So far it has worked pretty well but I have to admit that I’m having to learn the basics of R all over again. Way back in the day I used Matlab (expensive) a bit and R has always been compared pretty well to it. Python is another alternative that can do many of the same things but I figured I’d dust off my R syntax again. If you like to mess with data on the cheap R might help you get your numbers on.