R is a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics that is supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis.
R is a GNU package. The source code for the R software environment is written primarily in C, Fortran, and R. R is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and pre-compiled binary versions are provided for various operating systems.
The first thing you need to do to get started with R is to install it on your computer. R works on pretty much every platform available, including the widely available Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems.
After you install R you will need to launch it and start writing R code. Before we get to exactly how to write R code, it’s useful to get a sense of how the system is organized.
RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R. It includes a console, syntax-highlighting editor that supports direct code execution, as well as tools for plotting, history, debugging and workspace management.