1a - Introduction to R and RStudio

Video lecture recorded by György Barabás

Key take-aways:

- R is a programming language originally developed for statistics, but over time it has become very popular among scientists and data analysts (2:17).

- R is a bare-bones program which does little more than take instructions written in R and execute them. RStudio is an integrated development environment for R that makes it pleasant and productive to work with R programs (5:07).

- RStudio splits the screen into four quarters: one to directly communicate with R (the console area; 8:18), one to write R programs in (as a text file which later can get executed; 9:38), one for the so-called "environment" (listing objects we create which R "remembers" as long as we do not restart it; 13:41), and one for navigating the file system (and also to manage packages, view plots that we have created, get help, and so on; 15:15).

- Partially completed commands sent to the console either have to be finished or aborted (by pressing the Escape key). One sees that a command has not yet been completed by the console prompt changing to a + symbol (11:16).

- The location of every file is calculated relative to the current "working directory". If a file is directly found inside the working directory, then no path information is needed to use it. One can set the working directory manually inside RStudio (16:08).

- RStudio is heavily customizable; you are welcome to choose a setup which makes your own life the most comfortable (21:53).

- Help is readily available, both within R itself and online. R is a very widely used tool, so if one has some problem, looking online for help will almost certainly lead to finding relevant solutions (29:24).