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Installation of R

Before you start learning the syntax, the first step is to install R on your local machine. The software environment is open source and available for free download through CRAN. It can be run on a number of operating systems, and is supported on Windows, MacOS, and various UNIX platforms.

If you click on download you will be navigated to a page with a number of mirrors. While there are a number of different options that you can choose from, I have always used the fist option under USA which is UC Berkley.

While there is no debate over the power or base R, having some friendly user interface can go a long way. To this end, the I recommend downloading RStudio. RStudio is a free and open-source integrated development environment (IDE) specifically for R. RStudio is also available for a number of different operating systems and the can be downloaded here.

RStudio not only provides a user-friendly interface to R code editing and visualization, there are a number of other powerful tools provided by the developers. For example Shiny allows you to use R to create interactive web-based graphics. You can find an entire gallery of Shiny visualizations on the RStudio website. In this gallery you will find that some of these examples are directly related to biological sciences such as the interactive Genome Browser.

Now that you have both R and RStudio installed on your machine, you can simply open RStudio to write code, perform statistics, and create publication quality graphics.