Introduction to R Programming

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R PACKAGE

R is a programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is an implementation of S programming language with lexical scoping semantics. R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now developed by R Development core. R is a part of the GNU project. Its source code is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and pre-compiled binary versions are provided for various operating systems. R uses a command line interface, through several graphical interfaces are available. R provides a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering and others) and graphical techniques. The Bioconductor project provides R packages for the analysis of genomic data, such as Affymetrix and cDNA microarray object-oriented data handling and analysis tools, and has started to provide tools for analysis of data from next generation high-throughput sequencing methods. There are hundreds of contributed packages for R, written by many different authors. Some recommended packages are distributed with every binary distribution of R. Most are available for download from CRAN and repositories such as Bioconductor.

INSTALLING  R:

          Both source code and binaries for Windows, Mac OS X, and several Linux distributions are available. You can install R on your computer from the R website, http://www.r-project.org/.

  1. Click on the 'CRAN mirror' link in the menu on the left side of the page.
  2. Pick a location for downloading, preferably a geographic location near you.
  3. Pick the operating system that you are using, Windows, Mac, or Linux.
  4. Perhaps start with 'base' software.
  5. Peruse information in the README file.
  6. If using Windows, click on the R-installation .exe file to install.

I have installed & worked in the version of R 2.14.1. The version was released on December 22 2011, once installed; to start up R's command line you should double click the R icon. The Command line should be greeted with:-


The > (greater-than symbol) is called the prompt. If a command is too long to fit on a line, a + is used for the continuation prompt.



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