Hi

In the tutorial it is described that one need 7 days to learn zorro. This is a nice target which help the beginner to know the effort needed and the results expected from it.

What about R? Not sure how to begin and how much time is needed to swim on it without sinking.

It takes very little time to get up and running with R, especially if you have another language under your belt already. Spend some time up front learning the basics of the syntax (particularly how to assign values to variables, how to select or subset data, the different data types, vectorization) and you can be doing basic analysis, plotting and data manipulation within hours. This website will teach you more than enough to be dangerous: http://www.statmethods.net/

Having said that, there are a few things that will trip up the beginner. I really enjoyed reading this guy's summary of several of those things: http://arrgh.tim-smith.us/

I don't think you could ever really 'master' R, since there are several thousand packages that make up the full suite of its functionality! But there is plenty of help both online (eg here are the questions and answers tagged 'R' on stack overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r) and in the documentation.

The best advice I can give you is to dive in and start playing with the language. You will be surprised at how much you can accomplish in a short amount of time. Post here any specific questions; I'd be glad to try to answer them.

You will need 7 days to learn the basics of R as well. But then it becomes different. Unlike C, R is full of traps. It is easy to make mistakes, which then do not produce error messages, but just wrong results. The only way to deal with that is experience. So you need to know R in and out for accomplishing a complex project. How long this takes is hard to tell. 7 weeks? 7 years?

I agree with jcl. R is not like any other programming language. The syntax is not always clear. Also, R is a statistical language (and extremely powerful in this regard). Some knowledge of statistics is a prerequisite for using R. You might be able to produce an R program to generate some output, but interpreting that output might be a different matter (typical output includes scatterplots, boxplots, etc).

Thanks for all the inputs. All give a good picture of what it is to deal with R