Introduction to R Programming

Synopsis:

This blog entry is the first post of R programming series. In this post, I will be introducing you to R Programming and some useful code snippets.

Introduction to R:

R is a software programming language for statistics and data science. There are wide variety of packages for data processing, visualization, analysis built for R.

Installation:

R can be downloaded by following instructions from CRAN

R Studio:

R studio is an IDE for writing and executing R programs. It can be downloaded here

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Hello World !!

The R code and data location will be found at working directory.

Setting working directory:

setwd("/tmp/RCode/")

Get work directory location:

getwd()

Installing packages

install.packages("somepackage")

Loading library

library(somepackage)

To get more information about the library before loading it

library(help=somepackage)

Helloworld.R

print("Hello world")

Running the Helloworld.R is very simple.

> source("Helloworld.R")
[1] "Hello world"
>

SWIRL:
You can learn basic R programming with a “R Programming” course in Swirl.
I recommend you to take a look at it to get hands-on practice of R. Please run the following commands in R console to get started with Swirl R course.

> install.packages("swirl")
> library(swirl)

Here is a screenshot of how it looks in your terminal

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Swirl[/caption]

I like to summarize this post with one more handy command for clearing the console.

CTRL + L

Thanks for watching this post. I will show some useful code snippets used in R for data analysis in my following posts. Until then Good Bye!!

UPDATE: There is an online swirl browser and course from data camp to learn “R programming” online.

R Programming with swirl