Appendix: Getting Started
Obtaining R
R is available here: http://cran.r-project.org/.
Consoles with a limited but handy menu come with the Windows and Mac distributions. These make browsing available packages and documentation somewhat easier. In Unix, the R executable will generally install into /usr/bin/R and uses x11 windows for graphs.
The commands in this tutorial work for all R platforms.
Quick and Dirty Essentials of R
Upon starting R, you will see a prompt describing the version of R you are accessing, a disclaimer about R as a free software, and some functions regarding license, contributors and demos of R.
R uses an interactive shell—each line is interpreted after you hit return. A '>' prompt appears when R is ready for another command. In this tutorial, all commands that a user enters appear in bold after the prompt.
Built-in functions and simple mathematical calculations are the basics of R language. By typing 1+1 and hitting enter, you’ll observe the following:
> 1+1
[1] 2> myAnswer<-sqrt(81)
> myAnswer
[1] 9
Just like a calculator, you can also take logs log()
, find the sin of angles sin()
, and take absolute values of any real
number abs()
. R allows you to store
your results in a variable by using the " <-
" operator. To view the value of a
variable, simply type its name. Names in R are case-sensitive, so one,
One, and oNe are three different variables. You can also create a vector
(a collection of elements) using variables of the same type (int, num,
etc):
> x<-c(0,1,2,3) ...
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