Preface

As a researcher we need to know how to work with data. One of the best ways to do that is with R. R is a free and an open source language that was specifically developed for reading, manipulating, analysing data and publishing results. In this book, we’ll take a look at how we can get started with R. This is an introductory book, so you don’t need to have experience with R or with computer programming.

In order to start work with R, you need to install the Base R and RStudio.

Setup Instructions

The first step to working with R is to actually get Basic R on your computer. This is easy and it’s free. The most common way by far to work with R is within a desktop application called RStudio. Like Basic R, this is free and it’s open source and available for multiple platforms. Basic R is the underlying statistical computing environment, but using R alone is no fun. RStudio is a graphical integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R much easier and more interactive. You need to install Basic R before you install RStudio.

Windows

  • Download R from the CRAN website.
  • Run the .exe file that was just downloaded
  • Go to the RStudio download page
  • Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Windows XP/Vista/7/8 (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
  • Double click the file to install it
  • Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

macOS

  • Download R from the CRAN website.
  • Select the .pkg file for the latest R version
  • Double click on the downloaded file to install R
  • Go to the RStudio download page
  • Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Mac OS X 10.6+ (64-bit) (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
  • Double click the file to install RStudio
  • Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

Linux

  • Follow the instructions for your distribution from CRAN, they provide information to get the most recent version of R for common distributions. For most distributions, you could use your package manager (e.g., for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base, and for Fedora sudo yum install R), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this are usually out of date. In any case, make sure you have at least R 4.0.0.
  • Go to the RStudio download page
  • Under Installers select the version that matches your distribution, and install it with your preferred method (e.g., with Debian/Ubuntu sudo dpkg -i rstudio-x.yy.zzz-amd64.deb at the terminal).
  • Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.