R beginner tutorial 1 - Getting started with R and R studio IDE

This short blog post will teach you how to install R and also introduce you to R studio.

R Studio is an Integrated Development environment for programming with R. R studio makes programming with R way lot easier than the boring command line GUI that comes with base R system.

Installing R and R studio on windows 

First of all you need to download the latest base R package for installing the basic version of R on your machine. R is supported by the CRAN project and thus you can download R from the nearest CRAN mirrors. 

It is recommended that you learn R on a 64-bit machine because of the memory benefits. Still, for now, a 32-bit version will too suffice. 

Check your OS version by right click on My computer-> Properties

Installing R on windows

Now, log on to http://cran.r-project.org/ 

select download R for Windows -> click on "base" -> click on "Download R for windows"

This will start downloading the base R package for your machine.  After the download gets finished just RUN the .exe file as an administrator and finish the installation of R.

Installing R studio on windows

Now that you've set up R, its time to install R studio. Log on to https://www.rstudio.com/

select "download Now" -> select the Desktop Version -> select the correct OS platform. 

After the download gets finished just RUN the .exe file as an administrator and finish the installation of R studio.

Setting up R studio

After both R and R studio are installed, its time to set up R studio for windows. 

R beginner tutorials : 0 - Introduction to R

What is R? Programming Language ? Software? 

 According to the official CRAN website, R is a language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

How is R useful?

R is useful for carrying out data analysis and Visualization using packages which are all open source and thus extract knowledge from data. R is also used widely in statistics and bioinformatics to analyze the data. 

R was created in New Zealand by ross Ihaca and Robert Gentleman. 

What kind of Programming does R support?

R is an in-memory command line interface supporting Language. You can read your data-sets into R which get stored onto the RAM and give operational commands one-by-one to analyze it. R also supports data-connectivity and you can make connections to file to manipulate the data within them. 

Why is R so popular?

The fact that R is open-source, provides a lot of fascinating graphics packages and has a large user community all make up for the fact that R is currently the most popular statistical programming language. 

Who should Learn R?

R language is useful in a variety of fields. People from diverse backgrounds, career paths and college majors learn R nowadays as it is very useful. The main target group for R learners consists of undergraduate students in maths, IT, computer engineers, statistics students, business analysts, biochemical students, bioengineering students and a lot of other folks. 

How to get started?

R is basically divided into 2 parts :

• The Base R package ( this is the default software that you install to work with R)
• other packages 

The other packages in R are all a collection of libraries which contain functions to carry out different operations as per requirement. you can install them as per your needs.