Category Archives: R

Learning R

I have decided to improve my computer skills and in particular learn a little R.

R

R is a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a GNU project which is similar to the S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues.

http://www.r-project.org/about.html

This sounds great. According to the R website, R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display. What makes R useful to me is the fact that it is a programming language (conditionals, loops, recursive functions etc) with built-in operators for calculations with matrices.

Other people like R for its data handling and analysis tools.

Some graphics

Among other things, R is quite good with graphics. Look at this example taken from the R website.

volcano

volcano2

RStudio

Along side R, I will be using RStudio.

RStudio is a free and open source integrated development environment for R. You can run it on your desktop (Windows, Mac, or Linux) or even over the web using RStudio Server.

http://www.rstudio.com/ide/

My Plans

So, learning R is going to be a weekend project for fun, rather than a serious project. As I manage to develop some code, hopefully with some nice graphics, I will post them here. I imagine a lot of the code will be adapted from peoples existing codes and I will try to give credit as best I can.

If you know of any good resources to help me learn R, then please feel free to share them here. As I find useful websites I will link to them.

Links

The R Project for Statistical Computing

RStudio IDE