Chapter 6. First Steps with R for Excel Users
In Chapter 1 you learned how to conduct exploratory data analysis in Excel. You may recall from that chapter that John Tukey is credited with popularizing the practice of EDA. Tukey’s approach to data inspired the development of several statistical programming languages, including S at the legendary Bell Laboratories. In turn, S inspired R. Developed in the early 1990s by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, the name is a play both on its derivation from S and its cofounders’ first names. R is open source and maintained by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Because it was built primarily for statistical computation and graphics, it’s most popular among researchers, statisticians, and data scientists.
Note
R was developed specifically with statistical analysis in mind.
Downloading R
To get started, navigate to the R Project’s website. Click the link at the top of the page to download R. You will be asked to choose a mirror from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). This is a network of servers that distributes R source code, packages, and documentation. Choose a mirror near you to download R for your operating system.
Getting Started with RStudio
You’ve now installed R, but we will make one more download to optimize our coding experience. In Chapter 5, you learned that when software is open source, anyone is free to build on, distribute, or contribute to it. For example, vendors are welcome to offer an integrated development ...
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