September 2013
Beginner to intermediate
396 pages
8h 8m
English
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 1. Introduction
Congratulations! You’ve just begun your quest to become an R programmer. So you don’t pull any mental muscles, this chapter starts you off gently with a nice warm-up. Before you begin coding, we’re going to talk about what R is, and how to install it and begin working with it. Then you’ll try writing your first program and learn how to get help.
Chapter Goals
After reading this chapter, you should:
- Know some things that you can use R to do
- Know how to install R and an IDE to work with it
- Be able to write a simple program in R
- Know how to get help in R
What Is R?
Just to confuse you, R refers to two things. There is R, the programming language, and R, the piece of software that you use to run programs written in R. Fortunately, most of the time it should be clear from the context which R is being referred to.
R (the language) was created in the early 1990s by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, then both working at the University of Auckland. It is based upon the S language that was developed at Bell Laboratories in the 1970s, primarily by John Chambers. R (the software) is a GNU project, reflecting its status as important free and open source software. Both the language and the software are now developed by a group of (currently) 20 people known as the R Core Team.
The fact that R’s history dates back to the 1970s is important, because it has evolved over the decades, rather than having been designed from scratch (contrast this with, for example, Microsoft’s .NET ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.