BlueSky Statistics version 10 is free but closed-source software for data science. It adds easy-to-use menus to the R programming language. Read a full review here, and download the software free from the BlueSky website.
The 600-page BlueSky Statistics User Guide below explains how to use the software and assumes a minimal background in statistics, artificial intelligence, or machine learning. The search icon is the magnifying glass in the upper left corner. Click it again to make it disappear. The table of contents and the 1,300-entry index are all live links directly to each topic. The first 19 pages of the book are the preface, table of contents, etc., use Roman numerals and are not included in the page count. So, if you tell it to go to page 100, you will end up on page 81. The other navigation methods are preferred.
The printed version of the guide is available here. The PDF is not downloadable, as the advertising on this page helps support the considerable effort required to maintain this rapidly expanding software.
Errata
- While the back cover of the book says BlueSky version 10 is open-source, that is no longer the case.
- Several step-by-step examples end with “then click OK to run it.” That has been replaced with clicking a triangular “play” button in version 10.
- The item “Variables> Concatenate” is covered in the “Variables> Compute” section, when it is instead a higher level topic in the BlueSky menus.
- The triple-bar (“hamburger”) menu is being reverted to the classic name of “File.”