Downloading and Installing R

These are instructions for downloading and installing R!

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Introduction

Windows

Mac

Introduction

R was created as a statistical programming language. But these days it also rocks at jobs like:

• cleaning and manipulating large data or complex data sets
• creating good graphic
• writing reports and slides (where you can embed your analysis into your text - no need to copy and paste your graphs)
• creating interactive reports that you can share with your colleagues and they can load through a web browser
• easily distributing reusable code within your organisation (or your friends - yes the rest of us have used R to analyse our fitbit data too)

In order to get going with R, you need to download two things:

• The R language itself.
• An IDE

When people who use R a lot say "I did that in R", they are referring to the language itself. However, when they then go to show you the code that they wrote to do it, and how it executes, they will show it to you through an IDE.

IDE stands for integrated development environment. This is a fancy way of saying that it's a desktop application that helps us to develop in our given programming language.

R has two main IDE's. However, here at Mango we think that the best IDE for those new to R is called RStudio.

Thus, in order to download and use R on your own machine, you need to download both R and RStudio. This guide will show you how to do both.

Windows

Installing R

To download R itself, go to: https://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/ Click on the link for "Download R 3.3.1 for Windows" (choosing to save the file if you get a popup with save or open options).

Once the download is complete, open a file explorer window and go to your downloads folder (or the location you have downloaded the file to if you chose to put it somewhere else).

If you have administration rights on your machine, right click on the executable and select "run as administrator"; if you don't, just double click on the file.

This will install R on your machine.

Installing RStudio

To download RStudio go to: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/

Scroll down to the "Installers", and click the one for Windows (choosing to save the file if you get a popup with save or open options).

Run this executable just as you did the R one above.

Awesome! You are now ready to start using R!

Mac

Installing R

If you are running Marvericks or higher, you need to download this file:

http://cran.us.r-project.org/bin/macosx/R-3.3.1.pkg

If you are running 10.6 (Snow Leopard) - 10.8 (Mountain Lion) you need this file:

http://cran.us.r-project.org/bin/macosx/R-3.2.1-snowleopard.pkg

Go to your downloads folder and double click the file. This should start the installer.

Installing RStudio

To download RStudio go to: https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/

Scroll down to the "Installers", and click the one for Mac (choosing to save the file if you get a option to do so).

Install this file in the same way as you installed R.

Awesome! You are now ready to start using R!