1.1 What is R?

Go Google it. This is The Worst Stats Text eveR.

Okay, okay. Briefly, R is a statistical programming language. That language is made up of functions and various objects (R is functional and object-oriented). Objects are things that we do stuff to, or that we create by doing stuff. Functions are the things that do stuff to objects or create objects by doing things. A lot of functions and objects are included in the base software distribution (this is the one you just downloaded). Other collections of functions and objects are available through “packages”. You could think of these packages like web-extensions, add-ins for Microsoft programs, or mods for Minecraft. These packages may be written in R or built on a variety of other programming languages you may have heard of like C, C++, java, Python, etc. You can see a YouTube demo of installing packages in RStudio here. We will talk more about this later.

Because R is open-source anybody can write packages (even me). Therefore, there are lots of packages out there and many of them have functions that do the same thing but have slightly different names or behaviors. This framework, and an avid user-community has propelled the capabilities of R and RStudio during recent years, and now R can do everything from basic arithmetic to spatial time-series analysis to searching Amazon. This means that learning R is also a lot like learning the English language because there are about 10 ways to do everything and many of those are based on other programming languages.