Here I’ve set the editor color theme in RStudio to Solarized Dark, which is easier on the eyes when spending a lot of time coding in R. In comparison to RStudio, the basic R IDE/console is extremely basic and doesn’t provide as many accessible tools as RStudio does.

Most people who use R also use RStudio because it provides a clean point-and-click dashboard of tools where you can type your code, view your figures, organize your data, variables, and files, as well as viewing the help window. That’s what the plain R console looks like I just loaded up some data, viewed the first few rows, and renamed the columns.īy comparison, RStudio is a more versatile IDE, or Integrated Development Environment. You could code in R without using RStudio, as you can see in the image below.

So R is the programming language itself, and it comes with an environment or console that can read and execute your code. 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). 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).įor starters, R is a free open-source programming language used for organizing, analyzing, and visualizing data. 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. One of the first steps to learning R is to have it downloaded and installed on your computer.

Downloading rstudio