The R Manuals

edited by the R Development Core Team.

Current Version: 2.12.2 (February 2011)

The following manuals for R were created on Debian Linux and may differ from the manuals for Mac or Windows on platform-specific pages, but most parts will be identical for all platforms. The correct version of the manuals for each platform are part of the respective R installations. Here they can be downloaded as PDF files or directly browsed as HTML:

An Introduction to R is based on the former "Notes on R", gives an introduction to the language and how to use R for doing statistical analysis and graphics. [browse HTML | download PDF ]
A draft of The R language definition documents the language per se. That is, the objects that it works on, and the details of the expression evaluation process, which are useful to know when programming R functions. [browse HTML | download PDF ]
Writing R Extensions covers how to create your own packages, write R help files, and the foreign language (C, C++, Fortran, ...) interfaces. [browse HTML | download PDF ]
R Data Import/Export describes the import and export facilities available either in R itself or via packages which are available from CRAN. [browse HTML | download PDF ]
R Installation and Administration [browse HTML | download PDF ]
R Internals: a guide to the internal structures of R and coding standards for the core team working on R itself. [browse HTML | download PDF ]
The R Reference Index: contains all help files of the R standard and recommended packages in printable form. [download PDF, 16MB, approx. 3100 pages]

Translations of manuals into other languages than English are available from the contributed documentation section (only a few translations are available).

The latex or texinfo sources of the latest version of these documents are contained in every R source distribution (in the subdirectory doc/manual of the extracted archive). Older versions of the manual can be found in the respective archives of the R sources. The HTML versions of the manuals are also part of most R installations (accessible using function help.start()).