• What Others Say about R
• My Journey in Learning R
• Provide History and Overview of R
• Why You Should Learn the R Programming Language (Pros & Cons)
• Introduce basic commands in R
• Introduce R Script and R Markdown
  
• Install some R packages
  
• Illustrate: generate R data, data in R, and Export Excel Data in R

• R is a dialect of the S programming language and was developed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman in the year 1995. A stable beta version was released in the year 2000.

• 2016: R ranked as the top programming language for data science in the annual “Kaggle Data Science Survey,” solidifying its position as a leading tool in the field.

The pros:

• R is free
• R’s popularity is growing – More and more people will use it
• Almost all statistical methods are available in R
• New methods are implemented in add-on packages quickly
• Algorithms for packages and functions are publicly available (transparency and reproducibility)

The pros:

• R provides a huge variety of graphical outputs
• R is very flexible – Essentially everything can be modified for your personal needs
• R is compatible with all operating systems (e.g. Windows, MAC, or Linux)
• R has a huge community that is organized in forums to help each other (e.g. Stack Overflow)
• R is fun

The cons:

• Relatively high learning burden at the beginning (even though it’s worth it)
• No systematic validation of new packages and functions
• No company in the background that takes responsibility for errors in the code (this is especially important for public institutes)
• is almost exclusively based on programming (no extensive drop-down menus such as in SPSS)
• R can have problems with computationally intensive tasks (only important for advanced users)

• Obtain a copy of an R language installer from a dependable source or directly from the Internet. The URL is http://cran.r-project.org/
• The latest version of R is 4.3.1

1. Deng, Roger D., R Probramming for Data Science, 2014, Lean Publishing.
2. http://cran.r-project.org/
3. https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/