R for SAS and SPSS Users
R. Allan Reese · Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A (Statistics in Society) · 2009
Two classes of package user might be interested in this book: users who are happy with their pack-age but fancy a few extensions in R to add novel analyses or to check results, and users who fancy a completely new approach and perhaps want to start programming from scratch. According to the preface, readers will become able to read data into R, manage their data, create publication quality graphs and run basic analyses. The claim is, ‘If you know SAS or SPSS, reading this book should be a nice leisurely step before diving into a book [on programming in R]’. Regretfully, as a leisure experience, this seemed to me nearer to being stuck in a bank-holiday traffic jam. Having used SPSS since 1973, and watched with interest the growing use of R without yet participating, I would put myself in the first class of users. It would be very useful at times to extend SPSS and to take advantage of the techniques that are contributed through R libraries. Users of SAS, and of other statistics packages, will hopefully see parallels. SPSS offers a convenient link through the SPSS-R integration package from the company Web site. Even this revealed the capacity of software to irritate. Install SPSS (version 17.0); fetch the latest R (version 2.8); then run the integration package. Oops, it will not accept R later than version 2.7. So uninstall R, fetch previous version, and rerun the interface.