R : An introduction (Part I)

Introduction

Today a blogpost about R. R is a Statisitcal Programming Language and can be downloaded from the CRAN site. From Wikipedia : R is a free software programming language for statistical computing and graphics and it seems that R is widely used among statisticians and Data miners. R is an implementation of the S programming language. I was curieus about the name R and it seems that it's named after first names of the first authors of R.

Installation of R and RStudio

In this blogpost I'll write about the installation of R studio and some small examples. This is a very popular IDE environment and provides a powerful and productive user interface for R. It's free and open source , available for Windows, Max and Linux. But before you can use R studio you need install R. If you don't, you'll recieve the following message:

For this blogpost I've installed the following software:

• R (version 3.0.2). This is the console application and has some basic functionality and it seems to be differ between the operating systems.
• R Studio (version 0.98). R Studio is cross platform application that can be used for analysis. 

R studio

When you have started R studio the following window appears.

Here is a screenshot of some expressions I've borrowed from Wikipedia.

There are some pre installed datasets in R and one of them is "cars". This is a set of data containing the braking distances that were recorded for cars travelling at different speeds. I've tried some graphics.

Conclusion

R Studio is a great tool for analyzing datasets with R. There is a lot of information available on the internet that will help you learn R. Here is a good resource : Wikibooks.

Greetz,
Hennie