Download + Intro to R & Rstudio

Nicky Wakim, Jessica Minnier, and Meike Niederhausen

Introduction to R

Artwork by @allison_horst

What is R?

  • A programming language
  • Focus on statistical modeling and data analysis
  • Useful for epidemiology, biostatistics, and data science
  • Great visualizations
  • Also useful for most anything else you’d want to tell a computer to do
  • Interfaces with other languages i.e. python, C++, bash
  • Free and open source!

What is RStudio?

  • R is a programming language
  • RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE)
    • An interface to use R (with perks!)

Modern Dive

We open RStudio on our computer (not R!)

  • When you are on your computer, you will open RStudio to use R
  • If you open R directly, it will much harder to navigate!

 

Do NOT open this!

Open this!

RStudio interface

  • Editor window: where you write your code
  • Console: where you see the output of your code
  • Environment pane: where you see the objects you’ve created
  • Viewer pane: where you see plots, files, and help pages

So let’s download them!

 

  • You must install R first
    • Even if you have R installed already, I highly recommend installing the latest version
    • In the future, you will periodically want to update this
  • Install RStudio Desktop Open Source License (second)

References