Lesson 1 Basics of R


Learning Objectives

  • Articulating motivations for using R
  • Introduce participants to the RStudio interface
  • Point to relevant information on how to get help, and understand how to ask well formulated questions

R is a versatile, open source programming/scripting language that’s useful both for statistics but also data science. Inspired by the programming language S.

  • Open source software under GPL.
  • Superior (if not just comparable) to commercial alternatives. R has over 7,000 user contributed packages at this time. It’s widely used both in academia and industry.
  • Available on all platforms.
  • Not just for statistics, but also general purpose programming.
  • For people who have experience in programmming: R is both an object-oriented and a so-called functional language
  • Large and growing community of peers.