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Introduction to R

Suggested prerequsite courses: Introduction to the Command Line, Programming Concepts.

This short course is designed to teach the basics of the R programming language.

To use R, the very first thing you'll need to do is get R running. For this tutorial you can choose one of two options:

Option 1: You can run R inside JupyterHub - either a hosted instance or your own installation. (Instructions for setting that up can be found on the environment setup pages. Start by logging into the site, start a new tab by pressing the + button, and then choose 'R' from the 'Notebook' section. You should see something like this:

img

You can type your commands into the box.

Or Option 2: you can download and install R and RStudio, and run it locally on your laptop. To do this, visit the Rstudio download page and then download 'R' and 'RStudio Desktop'.

Once you have done this, install both packages and then start RStudio. You should see something like this: img

The R prompt is in the left hand pane - you can type your commands in there.

Note

There are a couple of differences between these two environments, which we list here for clarity:

  • In R/Rstudio you press <enter> to run a command, while in JupyterHub you press <shift>-<enter>.

  • the prompt looks different - in RStudio it looks like >, while in JupyterHub it looks like [ ]: followed by a box in the page. In this tutorial we will write > to indicate the prompt.

  • Some of the output is formatted differently. (For example you'll notice this when we talk about vectors or values.)

  • Plots (and R help pages) appear inline in JupyterHub, but in a seperate pane for RStudio.

In this tutorial we will mostly write things the way R / RStudio show them, but as long as you're happy to allow for these differences, you can use the JupyterHub notebook.

Checking it works​

Whichever way you start R, you should now have an R prompt.

To check your R is really working, let's try out a command. For example we could print a message:

> print( "Hello there!" )
Note

The > is just there to indicate the prompt - don't type that! Type the command and press <enter> to run it.

Or if you are using JupyterHub, press <shift>-<enter> instead.

You should see a result like:

[1] "Hello there!"

Congratulations, you've got R working!

You're now ready to try out some fundamentals.