First things first, you need to install R, more specifically, R Studio. For the near future everything I will be demoing and working on will be with R Studio, it runs on Mac, it Runs on PC, it runs on Linux. I personally use a Mac, anecdotal evidence seems to support that abut 80-90% of academia shows up to class with a Mac, adult learners show up with a PC more so than not, so make of that what you will. Don’t worry about SQL and R, or Revolution R yet, that will come up at a later date, we are going to walk before we run.

What I am not going to do is waste a blog with a thousand screen shots teaching you to install R and the long drawn out history, I gain little from knowing it and nothing from discussing it. It came from S and New Zealand, and has about 5000 add in packages. Dozens of others have already down this in blogs and videos about the history, go find one and hop to it.

Here is one to get you started, it has just the facts!

What I will say, is that R is maintained by the Comprehensive R Archive Network, this is where you go to get R. What you really want is R Studio, it’s a friendly IDE that if you have ever used SSMS, will look a tiny bit familiar, and once you have been using you will never want to use the base R or Microsoft R client again. Rstudio is the Defacto default R client. You can install both, R and R Studio, I have them both, I only ever use R Studio.

After it is installed find a nice little video to give you a tour of the IDE or go exploring on your own, i normally do better when I do some exploring and then jump into a how to video. IDE’s over the ages have changed little. What we will be interested in is the R script tab(will show up after you open or create a new R file), Console, then all the stuff on the right hand side, environment, history, files, plot, packages, help, and viewer. We will dive into all the tabs soon!

Get to it, come back when you have R Studio installed!

Comprehensive R Archive Network
R Studio

Shep