Presentation

Introduction

This tutorial will give you some basic knowledge about working with R. It will also help

you to familiarize with an environment to work with R as it is provided in the computing

labs in the ETH main building.

About R

R is free software (copyright: GNU public license) and is available from http://stat.

ethz.ch/CRAN/. At this URL you nd a comprehensive Documentation, Manual, \An

Introduction to R" (about 100 pages pdf) and a shorter introduction Contributed, \R for

Beginners / R pour les debutants" (31 pages, English/French).

R-environments

A \professional" way of working with R is to edit R-script les in an editor and to transfer

the written code to a running R process. This can be set up on any platform. There are

many editors that support this. We recommend the use of R Studio, which is available for

all common platforms (http://rstudio.org).

Alternatives are the editor that comes bundled with R (syntax highlighting exists only

on Mac OS X), Emacs with the add-on package Emacs Speaks Statistics (http://stat.

ethz.ch/ESS/), TinnR (http://www.sciviews.org/Tinn-R/) and WinEdt on Windows

(http://www.winedt.com/). This tutorial will focus on working with R Studio.

Getting started with R Studio

We use R from within R Studio. To start R Studio, nd it in the applications menu or

type rstudio in a terminal.

R Studio combines all ressources required for programming R in a single tidy window, see

Fig. 1. The pane console contains a instance of R. It is not necessary to start R separately.

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