Section 1: Why Use R?
The learning curve for R is a little steep, and as you’re putting together your first scripts you might think: “why am I even using R? I could be doing this in Stata!”
Here are some good reasons to know R:
R is free! Install it on your desktop(s)! Avoid using the terminal servers to do your homework and research!
R is an open source project with a huge community of enthusiasts and developers.
Thanks to this community, there are easy-to-install packages available to help you accomplish almost anything you can think of (including text analysis, web scraping, data visualization, etc…).
R handles a variety of data structures and uploads a variety of data formats.
R is an object oriented language, so you can store your models and plots in objects and recall them later rather than running the code again.
If you save your code and annotate it well, it’s easy to replicate your analyses in R.
R produces pretty cool visuals.
Knowing R will make you look cooler and more tech-savvy.
Hopefully this presentation will help you overcome the initial hurdles of learning R so you will experience less of this:
