[After you have read through this module, and have downloaded and worked through the provided R examples, you should be proficient enough in R to be able to download and run other R scripts that will be provided in other posts on this site. You should understand the basics of good programming practices (in any language, not just R). You will also have learned how to read data in a file into a table in R, and produce a plot.]
Contents:
- Why use R for modelling?
- How to download R
- Some example R code with an overview of basic R commands
- Advancing on: programming constructs
- Good programming practices (in any language)
- Reading data files into R
Why use R for modelling?
I have programmed in many different computing and scripting languages, but the ones I most commonly use on a day to day basis are C++, Fortran, Perl, and R (with some Python, Java, and Ruby on the side). In particular, I use R every day because it is not only a programming language, but also has graphics and a very large suite of statistical tools. Connecting models to data is a process that requires statistical tools, and R provides those tools, plus a lot more.
Unlike SAS, Stata, SPSS, and Matlab, R is free and open source (it is hard to beat a package that is more comprehensive than pretty much any other product out there and is free!).