Getting R and RStudio

Jul 13, 2023

DataSciencePursuit

For the best coding experience, you should get both R and something to make writing R easier like an IDE.

What is an IDE?

IDE stands for Integrated development environment.

When you download R it does come with a simple code editor but getting an IDE will make coding much easier. Programming with just what R provides vs. using an IDE is like writing in Notepad vs writing in Microsoft word. With Notepad you have no help and limited styling options like font size. On the other hand, Microsoft Word has many useful features that help make writing easier and nicer looking. Examples are autofill, autocorrect, error flagging (like miss-spellings and grammar), styling, etc.

IDE’s come with features like code completion, syntax error highlighting, debugging etc. We will see these in action later in this courses. Our IDE of choice for R is RStudio. And that is what we will be using in this course.

Just an FYI, there are other applications you can use like Jupyter Notebooks, but for beginners, it may be easier to follow the course since if you use the same IDE we use (RStudio).

Get R and RStudio

There are different options to get R and RStudio. You can run R and RStudio for free online (recommended for beginners) or download R and RStudio on your computer. Using R online is the easier option since little or no setup is required. However, installing R on your computer will give you more control. We will mostly be using the downloaded version of R and RStudio , but the experience should be the same online for what we recommend.

Choose the option you would like and watch the video below for instructions for both (the video has chapters to help you go straight to the one you want to see).

• 2:14 Posit Cloud - online RStudio
• 7:21 Download and Install R and RStudio

Full video instructions

Next, learn how to run R as a calculator in RStudio.