Skip to main content

R and RStudio

A great deal of data analysis work is done in R - you'll need this installed. The recommended way is to work with RStudio, but it's also possible to use directly in the command-line, or via a Jupyter notebook and so on.

Installing R directly​

  • R is downloaded from the 'Comprehensive R Archive Network'. First, pick an appropriate mirror and then click the appropriate download button. This will guide you to install R - you want the 'base' version. (R can be installed in other ways too - e.g. it's also possible to have conda install R if you prefer - but this way is easiest.)

  • Rstudio can be downloaded from rstudio.com. Find the Rstudio product page and click 'Download Rstudio Desktop'.

Install both these packages (default options) and then try running Rstudio. You should see a window with a few panes showing R's default startup text, a file browser and some information on your R environment (which means the variables you have in your session.)

Trying it out​

For example to test it, let's try a few things. For example we could create a variable:

a = "Hello, this is a string"

(You should see the variable a appear in the Environment pane.)

Or make a simple plot:

x = seq( from = 0, to = 2*pi, by = 0.01 )
plot( x, sin(x), type = 'l' )

img

Or generate and plot a million samples from a Gaussian distribution:

data = rnorm( 1000000, mean = 0, sd = 1 )
hist(data)

img

Congratulations! You now have R installed.

Getting help​

R has a built-in help system which you can access by typgin ? followed by the symbol you're interested in. Or, you can type ?? followed by some text, which will do a more general search for the text in the help. For example, try ?sin to see what the sin function does.

Next steps​

A good thing to do is to install tidyverse.