Appendix A. Working with R and other tools
In this appendix, we’ll show how you can install tools and start working with R. We’ll demonstrate some example concepts and steps, but you’ll want to follow up with additional reading.
The primary tool for working our examples will be R as run inside RStudio. But other tools (databases, version control) are also highly recommended. You may also need access to online documentation or other help to get all of these tools to work in your environment. The distribution sites we list are a good place to start.
RStudio and the database tools we suggest require Java. You can download Java from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html. You won’t need to enable Java in your web browser (Java enabled in the web browser is currently considered an unacceptable security risk).
A precompiled version of R can be downloaded from CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org); we recommend picking up RStudio from http://rstudio.com. CRAN is also the central repository for the most popular R libraries. CRAN serves the central role for R, similar to the role that CPAN serves for Perl and CTAN serves for Tex. Follow the instructions given at CRAN to download and install R, and we suggest you install Git and RStudio before starting to use R.