Installing R

The R project for statistics can be downloaded from http://www.r-project.org

R IDE

For those not familiar with programming / scripting an IDE stands for Integrated Developer Environment, the IDE lets you type code into (much like typing into notepad) however they offer advantages such as auto completion, project/file grouping and debugging.

The two most popular IDE are Tinn-R and RStudio

Tinn-R – http://sourceforge.net/projects/tinn-r/

This is my favorite editor, mainly because the work spaces can be undocked from the main application, which makes it ideal for multimonitor computers. Unfortunately it is windows only.

RStudio – http://www.rstudio.org/

A nice looking editor that is simple to use, however lacks the customization ability of Tinn-R, not being able to undock windows was a deal breaker for me. The plus is that this IDE runs on Widnows, Mac OS and Linux.

The Basics of R

The following PDF tutorial by S.A Bashir provides a good starting point for learning the basic features of R such as Arithmetic Operations, Vectors, Matrices, dealing with missing data, data frames (time series data) and plotting.

http://www.luchsinger-mathematics.ch/Bashir.pdf