A (very) short introduction to R

R is a powerful language and environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is a public domain (a so called “GNU”) project which is similar to the commercial S language and environment which was developed at Bell Laboratories (formerly AT&T, now Lucent Technologies) by John Chambers and colleagues. R can be considered as a different implementation of S, and is much used in as an educational language and research tool. The main advantages of R are the fact that R is freeware and that there is a lot of help available online. It is quite similar to other programming packages such as MatLab (not freeware), but more user-friendly than programming languages such as C++ or Fortran. You can use R as it is, but for educational purposes we prefer to use R in combination with the RStudio interface (also freeware), which has an organized layout and several extra options. This document contains explanations, examples and exercises, which can also be understood (hopefully) by people without any programming experience. Going through all text and exercises takes about 1 or 2 hours. Examples of frequently used commands and error messages are listed on the last two pages of this document and can be used as a reference while programming.