1.3 Where do I start?

If you haven’t downloaded and installed the most recent versions of R and RStudio, you should probably go do that now. We’ll wait…

Once you have installed both of these, find and open RStudio on your computer so you can work along with the examples below.

It may be helpful to watch a couple of YouTube videos before going much further, especially if you are stuck already (no shame). There are tons of them out there, including some that walk you through how to install and open R and RStudio. They range from just a couple of minutes to a couple of hours. Here’s one example provided by the How To R Channel.

Depending on how long that took, you may or may not be enthused by the following:

the learning curve for R is steep…like a cliff, not a hill.

But, once you get the hang of it you can learn a lot really quickly. Cheat sheets like these reference cards can help you along the way by serving as miniature reference manuals in the mean-time. There are also tons of e-books and websites out there like the one you are reading now. And, there is a huge, active user-community just a Google away. Just searching “how to ___ in R” will return multiple results for most questions, with everything from open-source text books like this to R project websites (e.g. RStan) or programming forums like StackOverflow. You can find links to a few Additional Resources on the course website, but part of learning R is learning how to Google about R.