CRAN Task Views: Your guide to R packages

If you're like me, you've at times been frustrated by the looseness of the R package system. These are some of the facts of life in the R world:

• There are often many different functions with overlapping goals [for example, princomp() and prcomp()].
  
• The names of a packages may have little or no relationship to the functions in that package (for example, package "e1071" provides the tune() function for parameter tuning).
• There doesn't seem to be any organized, curated guide to the packages.

Well, at least the last point on this list of frustrations has been remedied. Be sure to check out the CRAN Task Views pages, which has exactly that: lists of packages with a brief blurb about each one, organized by topics (more than 20 at this writing), curated by (I assume) expert R users/developers.

My favorite guides at the moment are Machine Learning, and Multivariate Statistics.

Keep in mind, the above guides do not include BioConductor packages -- for that, you will still go to the BioConductor website.