Supporting Statistical Analysis for Research

1.2 Introduction

R is a powerful programming language for statistical computing and graphics generation. It's flexibility, extensibility, and no cost have contributed to R's wide use in academic environments and among statisticians.

R is open source and is supported by an extensive user community. The R Development Core Team and CRAN are at the center of the user community. The core team oversees the evolution of the base set of functionality which is included when R is installed. CRAN, the Comprehensive R Archive Network, is a repository of additional functionality, called packages. A great deal of additional functionality is available through CRAN.

RStudio provides an integrated development environment (IDE) for R users. This IDE provides support for project organization, source control, and document generation. RStudio will help you write R code faster and more efficiently. The use of RStudio is included in this article.