R help - Nov 2002 - Is R a good choice for this?

Hi.
  I'm working in a project about web-users behaviour analysis. In a few
words, it consists on:

- log-files recopilation and pre-analysis
- basic stadistics extraction (pages most visited, session lengths, etc.)
and on-line report generation in a web-viewable format
- more advanced analysis for web-users characterization

  The purpose of my project is implementing my own data analysis, so I don't
want to use commercial closed log-analysis tools; I need a tool for doing
all this work: basically data analysis and filtering; and on-line
web-reports generation.

  I don't know R language AT ALL, so do you think it would be a good choice?
What other related packages would I need?
  Do you know other Open Source alternatives?

  Thanks a lot and please excuse my poor English :)


PS: I'm not subscribed to the mailing list, so please reply me to
jsanchezs at sanostra.es

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Hi,

 | From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?Jordi_S=E1nchez_S=E1nchez?= <jsanchezs at
sanostra.es>
 | Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 12:09:23 +0100
 | 
 |   Hi.
 |   I'm working in a project about web-users behaviour analysis. In a few
 | words, it consists on:
 | 
 | - log-files recopilation and pre-analysis
 | - basic stadistics extraction (pages most visited, session lengths, etc.)
 | and on-line report generation in a web-viewable format
 | - more advanced analysis for web-users characterization

I would recommend perl (or rexx) for the first task.  R is basically a
vector-oriented programming language with its text-file analysis and
parsing possibilities, and a large number of statistical functions.
You can definitely do everything with text files in R too, but it is
perhaps faster and more straightforward in perl.

If you already have the data in a easily readable form (ascii tables,
xml), then it is easy to continue with statistics with R.  I am not
familiar with statistical functions in perl but I am sure they lay far
behind from those in R.

So, I guess you should use perl at least for the first step, and
depending on the complexity of the ,,more advanced analysis'' either
continue with it or switch to R at the second step.  BTW, R is using
perl heavily for installation and package management.

Perhaps it helps.

Ott
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