Wednesday, April 16, 2014

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. 

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