Why do I use R?

• It is free!
• It is fast, powerful and works on several different platforms
• It can produce wonderful visualisations
• It can produce reproducable research
• There is a wealth of development of both data and packages for use in R

Getting R

Use the R main site to download and install a suitable version of R for your machine. I would then recommend running through tutorials to get to learn the basics.

R is command line, which is not to everyone's taste. There are some GUIs available but I have settled on R Studio. R Studio is an IDE (integrated Development Environment) where you still have to write scripts but I find it much easer to use R this way. And once you have gotten in to writing scripts you will see it is a good way of doing this type of work because it allows you to produce reproducable research particularly if you use the R MarkDown approach.