First time using R? Check out my free mini-course, “5 Things Excel Users Should Know About R.”
R is a free statistical programming language that is very popular and powerful. I like to use it with RStudio, a program which allows for a smoother user experience along with some enhanced back-end capabilities to base R. The intro-level version of RStudio is also free.
Download instructions:
Here is a helpful video from Udacity on downloading RStudio for Windows (Mac will be very similar). Some screenshots and notes follow.
- Download R from the R Project homepage.
CRAN is an acronym for the “Comprehensive R Archive Network” and is a series of non-profit organizations around the globe hosting mirrors of the base R code. R is free and this distribution underscores the open-source nature of the “R project.”
2. Download RStudio.
The base R code you download from CRAN will come with its own graphical user interface (GUI) shown above.
For reasons I discuss in my course, RStudio is a preferred environment for working in R. RStudio is proprietary software that runs “on top” of base R (remember that R is open-source, so anyone can develop on top of the code as they like), but fortunately a free community version is available.
Once you’ve got RStudio on your machine, check out my “Tour of RStudio,” from which the above photo comes.
Important – you must download R and RStudio. RStudio needs the base R code to function.
Until next time…
Ever used R? Have ideas on how it could help you? Questions? Comments? Let me know.
If you are brand-new to learning R, check out my free mini course, “5 Things Excel Users Should Know About R.” You can also check out my blog posts on R using the “rstats” tag.
I hope to start sharing some of the cool things I have learned to do in R, but installing is a good first start.
Good! Expand. Go R!
You bet! I am also working quite a bit with Python as well, so that may factor in to the blog as well. Primarily I am working on text analytics and NLP of financial documents.