[This article was first published on R on R (for ecology), and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't. One of the first steps to learning R is to have it downloaded and installed on your computer. In this post I’ll show you how to do that and how to download and install RStudio—a key tool for using R, and how I do all my work and tutorials.If you want to follow along with a video tutorial, you can click on the image below where you can watch the first lesson in my full course on the Basics of R (for ecologists).For starters, R is a free open-source programming language used for organizing, analyzing, and visualizing data. Its versatility is highlighted by the large number of user-created packages that it comes with, which provide useful functions and guides that anyone can use (e.g., found on CRAN). So R is the programming language itself,...
