R as a programming language has taken the world by storm especially because of its capabilities in terms of data science and data visualization.
By virtue of being open source, R can be learnt without incurring any additional cost given the fact that there are myriad resources on R freely available over the internet.
Getting started is as simple as following the steps mentioned below:
- Download the CRAN of R from R’s website
- Install RStudio the IDE for R
- Myriad videos on R are available on youtube. Along with this easy to understand sample R codes are freely available over the internet. We can go through these and get started with R.
The following link from pluralsight mentions 5 simple steps to kick start your journey with R.
https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/data-professional/how-to-get-started-programming-in-r
I have found the sample codes on tutorialpoint very helpful to get an understanding on R.
Please refer to the following link to get started with R.
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/r/
About RStudio
RStudio provides a very user friendly interface to get started with R.
It is very easy to install and gets installed very fact on Windows, Mac, Linux machines.
RStudio has 4 tabs.
- The tab on the top left is where we can enter R scripts in .R extension files and run them , debug them through very easy to use tool bar icons.
- The top right tab is the workspace tab wherein we can see how work variables get changed when R codes are run. This is especially helpful when debugging R codes to have a look at important variables and their values during run time.
- The bottom left tab is for R console wherein we can run R commands and is the R command line interface.
- The bottom right tab is where we can get to see results of different plot functions and is especially useful for data visualization related functions.
Happy learning!!!!!