Section 1 Installing R and R-Studio
As mentioned in previous chapters, R is an open source program, meaning that the source code that is used to create a copy of R to run on a Mac, Windows, or Linux computer is available for all to inspect and modify. If your computer has the Windows®, Mac-OSX® or a Linux operating system, there is a version of R waiting for you at http://cran.r-project.org/. Download and install your own copy. If you sometimes have difficulties with installing new software and you need some help, there is a wonderful little book by Thomas P. Hogan called, Bare Bones R: A Brief Introductory Guide that you might want to buy or borrow from your library. There are lots of sites online that also give help with installing R, although many of them are not oriented towards the inexperienced user. I searched online using the term "help installing R" and I got a few good hits. One site that was quite informative for installing R on Windows was at "readthedocs.org," and you can try to access it at this TinyUrl: http://tinyurl.com/872ngtt. For Mac users there is a video by Jeremy Taylor at Vimeo.com, http://vimeo.com/36697971, that outlines both the initial installation on a Mac and a number of other optional steps for getting started. YouTube also has videos that provide brief tutorials for installing R. Try searching for "install R" in the YouTube search box. The rest of this chapter assumes that you have installed R and can run it on your computer as shown in the screenshot above. (Note that this screenshot is from the Mac version of R: if you are running Windows or Linux your R screen may appear slightly different from this.) Just for fun, one of the first things you can do when you have R running is to click on the color wheel and customize the appearance of R. This screenshot uses Syracuse orange as a background color. The screenshot also shows a simple command to type that shows the most basic method of interaction with R.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of installing R-Studio is having to install R first, but if you’ve already done that, then R-Studio should be a piece of cake. Make sure that you have the latest version of R installed before you begin with the installation of R-studio. There is ample documentation on the R-studio website, http://www.rstudio.org/, so if you follow the instructions there, you should have minimal difficulty. If you reach a page where you are asked to choose between installing Rstudio server and installing R-studio as a desktop application on your computer, choose the latter. For now you want the desktop/single user version. If you run into any difficulties or you just want some additional guidance about R-studio, you may want to have a look at the book entitled, Getting Started with R-studio, by John Verzani (2011, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media). The first chapter of that book has a general orientation to R and R-studio as well as a guide to installing and updating R-studio. There is also a YouTube video that introduces R-studio here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sAmqkZ3Be8 Be aware if you search for other YouTube videos that there is a disk recovery program as well a music group that share the R-Studio name: You will get a number of these videos if you search on "R-Studio" without any other search terms.
