Hi all I'm happy to announce that the most recent release of Spark, 2.1.2 is now available for download as an R package from CRAN at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SparkR/ . This makes it easy to get started with SparkR for new R users and the package includes code to download the corresponding Spark binaries. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-15799 has more details on this.
Many thanks to everyone who helped put this together -- especially Felix Cheung for making a number of fixes to meet the CRAN requirements and Holden Karau for the 2.1.2 release. Thanks Shivaram
