3.1 The R Project for Statistical Computing

R is an open source (i.e. free) programming language and software environment for statistical computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data analysis. As of July 2020, R ranks 8th in the TIOBE index, a measure of popularity of programming languages.

In addition to using R, we will also be using RStudio. RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R. The desktop version of R studio is also free, and comes with many useful features. In fact, the document you are reading was formatted in R studio.

This section will walk you through downloading, installing, and preparing R and RStudio for our purposes.

Note: this section is intended for installation on either a PC or a Mac. For those of you using Chromebooks (which uses a Linux operating system), you will not be able to install these programs unless you partition your hard drive to run purely in Linux. If you don’t know what that means, then I don’t suggest you go down that route. However, you are still in luck because Rstudio also offers a free cloud-based version of R that will serve the purpose of this course. You can sign up here: https://www.rstudio.com/products/cloud/.

Another Note: For those of you that have PCs or Macs and simply do not wish to download and install R and Rstudio, you are welcome to sign up to the Rstudio cloud as well. This will also be handy if you have a pesky work computer with a rigid fire wall. However, you should note that the cloud version of R and Rstudio can only be accessed if you have an internet connection.

A Final Note: The cloud-based version of Rstudio is relatively new and going through changes. As of the writing of this chapter, they are discussing discontinuing the free version and switching over to a fee-based scenario. They are also limiting the computation time for the free version, and this may be a constraint for us. I therefore ask that you contact me to discuss things if you are planning on taking the cloud route.