Why R ?
R is a statistical program: it will help you perform statistical analyses to better understand your data. It will also allow you to run almost any statistical model (linear regression, etc.) on these data.
R is also a programming language, but it is not a programming language like C or Java. It was not created for software development. Rather, it was developed by statisticians and data analysts as an interactive environment for data analysis. As a programming language, it allows you to develop your own functions and models. However, if you are new to R, you will not actually write functions, but rather use functions that have been written by others and contained in specialised packages.
As with any other programming language, you can save your work in scripts, which you can easily run at any time. These scripts serve as a record of the analysis you have performed, an essential feature that facilitates repeatable work.
Other attractive features are:
- R is free !
- R is open source, meaning that you can look at the codes (especially the codes of the packages you will be using). So you will know exactly what you are doing !
- R runs across all major platforms: Windows, Mac OS, Unix, Linux.
- R has a large and active community of users. So there are numerous resources for learning and asking questions.
- R makes it easy to build meaningful (and beautiful) plots from your data
- R enables developers to share software implementations of new data science techniques in the form of “packages”, which are extensions to R. There is now thousands of these packages available for immediate use.
Interactive data analysis occurs in the R console. In the R console, you can execute commands as you type them. There are several ways to gain access to a console but the simplest one is to download and install R, and then start it up on your computer.