Learning R | Part 1 | Basics of R & RStudio

Published Jun 03, 2019

This article is my attempt to give a boost to the careers of developers who want to start with Machine Learning , Artificial Intelligence , Data Science , Data Mining , Natural Language Processing and other opportunities related to Data.

Starting with some of the basic questions that arise before taking the leap of faith:

Is it necessary to know R/Python for you to explore the above fields? No.
Why do we need R/Python? To understand Data.

R programming is majorly used for Data Analysis. It enhances your understanding of Data and helps you explore the unexplored Data Points.

Advantages

Open Source
Being a vector language, function can be performed on the vector without looping through it, making it powerful.
It’s an interpreted language, making it run without any compiler thus making development easier.
Support for functions like charts, graphs, statistical functions etc makes it a smart choice for data science applications and statistical analysis.

Limitations

Performance & Scalability - It can very quickly consume all available memory. (Though there are a lot of memory optimisation packages available)
Security - The third party packages do not have any security check.

Usage

From the above advantages & disadvantages, I personally feel R can be used for understanding, interpreting and analysing data.
It can be used effectively in non-production applications for preprocessing & cleaning data. Also, it is a great tool to identify data points.

If you don’t understand your data, don’t expect machine to understand it.

Installation

R can be downloaded from here.
There are various GUI tools available for R programming like RStudio, Rattle, and R Commander. I found RStudio to be the best in terms of usage. It can be downloaded from here.

Understanding RStudio

RStudio with 4 Sections

Top Left → Editor where the code is written (Similar to VS Code, Sublime etc)
Bottom Left → Console (Similarly to the developer console and terminals)
Top Right → This is where all the variables used are listed along with the values.
Bottom Right → This contains 5 panels
1. Files → For organising and opening necessary files.
2. Plot → Any plots drawn are displayed here.
3. Packages → Shows list of system as well as user packages. (Checked
4. Help → As the name suggests.
5. Viewer → This panel is used to view local web content like static html files or a web application running locally.