## I love R already, but I have not got a clue how to use it

Thanks to Professor Paul A. Rubin, I have discovered GNU R and already I love it and think it is just the tool I need to plot a few of the graphs (of turnaround times for tasks) in my MSc project.

But there is one problem – I don’t really know how to use it and the online notes do not seem to me to be written in a particularly helpful, tutorial-like, way. All I want to do is plot some data, and do not really want to do it interactively either.

Still, I guess it will come with time. I have ordered this – R in a Nutshell – but I am not sure that is going to do the job, either.

Try and fail, try again and fail better.

## Good graphing software: any recommendations?

I need to draw some graphs with error bars and possibly logarithmic scales, maybe even on either axis. Any recommendations? The key thing is that it should be flexible – the task is to show the pattern most of all, so I want to fiddle with the parameters to get the clearest results.

In an ideal world the software would calculate $\sigma$ and draw the appropriate error bars based on the input, and produce output in EPS. The minimum is that it runs on Linux (I am not afraid of the configure,make, make install cycle either: in fact I rather miss the days when that was what you had to do for most interesting bits of software.