Mel Chua: Hacker. Writer. Researcher. Teacher. Human jumper cable.

An R tutorial that comes with a sample study on GNU/Linux participation… or is it the other way around?

Don Davis sent me this nice paper he wrote up with some colleagues – it’s a tutorial introduction to the statistics language R that includes a study on legitimate peripheral participation in the GNU/Linux community that uses the software and methodology. Basically, the study is the example they use in the tutorial, or they wrote a tutorial on how they did their study… whichever way you read it, it’s pretty cool.

Here’s the study, and here’s the R tutorial.

R has some nice data manipulation and graphing capabilities – it’s something I would love to look into more for tracking class results for TOS professors, as well as the overall TOS and Fedora statistics efforts. If and when I decide to pick it up, you can bet I’ll be using Don’s tutorial to do so. I wish my statistics class in college had been taught this way!