1

GETTING STARTED

As detailed in the introduction, R is an ex-

tremely versatile open source programming

language for statistics and data science. It is

widely used in every field where there is data—

business, industry, government, medicine, academia,

and so on.

In this chapter, you’ll get a quick introduction to R—how to invoke it,

what it can do, and what files it uses. We’ll cover just enough to give you

the basics you need to work through the examples in the next few chapters,

where the details will be presented.

R may already be installed on your system, if your employer or university

has made it available to users. If not, see Appendix A.

for installation instructions.

1.1 How to Run R..............................................................

R operates in two modes:interactiveandbatch. The one typically used is inter-

active mode. In this mode, you type in commands, R displays results, you

type in more commands, and so on. On the other hand, batch mode does