a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics

• Free to use
• Extensible
  • Over 7300 user contributed add-on packages currently on CRAN (The Comprehensive R Archive Network)
  • at least as many packages on github repositories
• Powerful
  • With the right tools, get more work done, faster.
• Flexible
  • Not a question of can, but how.
• Frustrating
  • Flexibility comes at a cost (easy to shoot yourself in the foot!).

• Graphics, statistics, machine learning, etc.
• Data acquisition, munging, management
• Literate programming (dynamic reports)
• Web applications

We will touch on all of these aspects. Slides and material are available at http://heike.github.io/rwrks/summerschool.

• Go to http://www.r-project.org/
• Click the CRAN link on the left, and pick a download site (0-Cloud is a good choice)
• Choose link based on your OS
• On Windows, choose the "base" subdirectory to install R.
• On OS X, choose the .pkg file to install R.

• Browse to https://www.rstudio.com/
• Mouse over Products and click RStudio
• Choose RStudio Desktop
• Click Download RStudio Desktop
• Choose the installer appropriate for your platform

From Julie Lowndes:

If R were an airplane, RStudio would be the airport, providing many, many supporting services that make it easier for you, the pilot, to take off and go to awesome places. Sure, you can fly an airplane without an airport, but having those runways and supporting infrastructure is a game-changer.

Create a project to contain all of the material covered in this set of tutorials:

• File -> New Project -> New Directory -> Empty Project

• File -> New File -> R Markdown -> OK -> Knit HTML

• From the R Markdown home page:

R Markdown is an authoring format that enables easy creation of dynamic documents, presentations, and reports from R. It combines the core syntax of markdown (an easy-to-write plain text format) with embedded R code chunks that are run so their output can be included in the final document. R Markdown documents are fully reproducible (they can be automatically regenerated whenever underlying R code or data changes).

• RStudio's cheatsheet gives a nice, concise overview of its capabilities.

• RStudio's reference guide lists its options.

• Download, save, and open the document which generates these slides in RStudio (you can do that with this R code):

curl::curl_download(
  "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/heike/rwrks/gh-pages/summerschool/01-Introduction-to-R/knitr/0-getting-started.Rmd",
  "0-getting-started.Rmd"
)
file.edit("0-getting-started.Rmd")

• Download, save, and open the corresponding R script.

curl::curl_download(
  "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/heike/rwrks/gh-pages/summerschool/01-Introduction-to-R/code/0-getting-started.R",
  "0-getting-started.R"
)
file.edit("0-getting-started.R")

If R is complaining about not having the package curl, run

install.packages("curl")

and try again