R

The R programming language can be downloaded at https://cran.rstudio.com/. The current available version of R is 3.5.0, but you don’t need to upgrade if you already have version 3.4 or later installed.

Jump directly to the download page for each platform:

For an interactive guide, the following videos by Roger Peng of Johns Hopkins Biostatistics are slightly outdated but cover the essential process.

RStudio

RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R that makes it much easier to use R. It includes a code editor, debugging and visualization tool, a file manager, and much more.

Download and install RStudio from the RStudio download page.

The current version of RStudio is 1.1.453 and any version greater than 1.1.0 will work. (Version 1.0+ will also work if already installed.)

Installing Packages

The R language is extended via user-created packages. You will need to be able to download and install packages for the course.

To test if you can install an R package, open RStudio, type the following into the Console pane and hit enter to run.

Installing a package from the RStudio Console.

Installing a package from the RStudio Console.

R will output messages while it works to install the package.

The package has installed.

The package has installed.

If this installation worked for you, you can go ahead and install the R package tidyverse. This package is actually a collection of packages that work together for a cohesive data processing workflow, and we will be using many of the packages included throughout the course. Because tidyverse installs many packages, the installation may take a little while to complete.

If you have any issues, copy the output and email to or .

Access to GitHub

We will also use GitHub to host course materials and to dicuss issues that come up during the course, so please make sure that you can browse to https://github.com/gerkelab/core-r-course. (You don’t need a GitHub account, you just need to be able to open the page in your browser.)