On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 05:11:55PM -1000, Ping-Wu Zhang wrote: > Could anyone recommend any good statistical package(s)? Does anyone > know whether there is any SPSS or SAS clone? Thanks. R has been recomended. Indeed it is excellent and free but rather time consuming to master (If you have no previous experience with something like S or S-Plus). You can get the basic 'R-2.0.1-0.fdr.4.fc3.i386.rpm' for FC3 at one of the CRAN Mirrors, see: http://www.r-project.org/ (Read the onsite README first and download 'plummer.gpg' to check the signature). This might be sufficient for your needs otherwise you may have to add additional specialized packages (there are many). Read the on site manuals: 'R Installation and Administration' and 'An Introduction to R' (especially the "A sample session" section) first. If the license fee is not an objection ($615.00 for single user with Base Documentation Set) I highly recomend Stata: http://www.stata.com/ Maybe you can get you company/institute or university dept. to order it for you. It is a bit easier to master than R and still cheaper than SAS. However the advice depends on what you need it for. Any package can produce simple summaries, graphs and the classical analyses. However if you need things like certain random effects models you might only be able to find the necessary tools in SAS for example. (Programming something yourself in R is not very enjoyable). Alexander
