What is R?

“R” refers to the programming language and software used to run scripts written in R.

Why Learn R?

For people new to programming learning R can be daunting but the long term benefits outweigh the frustrations of the initial learning curve.

Reproducibility

R allows users to reproduce, share, and collaborate their procedures for cleaning data and performing analyses. The ease of being able to reproduce results allows for greater ease when updating datasets and fixing mistakes.

Data Big and Small

R reduces barriers to accessing and working with big and small data. Packages and tools that integrate with R can allow a user to access data from different locations (e.g. databases, APIs, FTP) for big (and small) data of different formats.

Open Source Community

R is open source and free. These two characteristics are some of the main reasons why there is a massive and growing community of users and developers representing different disciplines that provide a seemingly endless resource for giving and receiving help.

Analyses and Visualizations

R is built for performing statistical analyses and modeling building and has the documentation to prove it, and more recently data visualization packages of R are becoming more sophisticated. These two main functionalities of R allows for a great deal of customization and transparency.

What is RStudio?

RStudio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for R. It is also an open source free product. It provides a visually organized environment for working with R in addition to providing additional tools that integrate with R (e.g. version control, creating apps or dashboards with RShiny, generating reproducible reports with RMarkdown, writing packages).