Installing R - R Tutorial

- [Instructor] One of the beautiful things about R is it gives you a lot of choices. And like any programming language, there are many different environments that you can use to work with R. Now, when you download the language, you'll see that you can use the native R app and it opens a set of different windows. Like for instance, this is the script window where you write your code. This is the console where you get your text output and other messages. Here's a help window and here's a graphical window. You can do it that way, but most people choose to use an interactive development environment like RStudio. Now, RStudio is a free open source program and I'm going to show you how to download and install it a little bit later. And it takes the same information as R. It has a script window where you put your lines of code, it has a console where you can get text output, it has an environment, lets you know what's saved in the memory, and it has graphs and plots. This is a very good way of working with R, it's the one I'm going to use, and it's what I recommend, but I do want you to be aware of a few other options. One of the things you need to know is that Posit, that's the company that makes RStudio, has an online version as well, and it's free for small analyses. For more than that, you're going to need to pay, but you can see it looks exactly the same. You can also use Google Colab, Colaboratory, which is well known among machine learning people who work with Python. But if you use this shortcut, colab.to/r, that will open up Google Colab with an R runtime. Now, it looks very different because it uses the Jupyter Data Science notebooks, but you can see that it runs the same lines of code. Here's the first six lines of our dataset, here's our graph. And this can be a really wonderful way to work with it because it's totally online and a lot of people are comfortable with this approach. One other choice is an app like my favorite, the open source, free Jamovi. It's a point and click application that looks like SPSS, but runs on R. And with Jamovi, you can get a desktop version. Let me show you what that looks like. Here you can see I'm actually running some R code. If I click on this, here's the code that runs and it works in the same way. Now, I normally don't run R Code in Jamovi. I use its menus and it's a great way for collaborating with people who aren't comfortable with code, but I want you to be aware it is capable of running R. There is also an online version, Jamovi Cloud. Now, I'll admit that right now, it's still in beta. It's not totally ready for primetime, and it doesn't run arbitrary lines of R code, it wants to do just the dropdown menus, but it's in development and I imagine that functionality will be added in the future. So the important thing to remember here is that you have many options. You have the R app, RStudio on your local computer and online, Google Colab, Jamovi on your local computer, and at least some of the functions online, many different ways of interacting with R, but all of them give you the same functions and give you the same insights when working with your data.