Getting started with R

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Installation

The simplest way is to use Homebrew:

$ brew install r

Another way is to download installation package from https://cloud.r-project.org/

“Hello world” of R

Run it from R console

Command R will start a R console, and you can run R code inside R console.

(base) ➜  benchling git:(b_test_pr) ✗ R

R version 4.2.2 (2022-10-31) -- "Innocent and Trusting"
Copyright (C) 2022 The R Foundation for Statistical Computing
Platform: aarch64-apple-darwin20 (64-bit)

...
> print("hello,world")
[1] "hello,world"

Run it from terminal

Rscript is a binary front-end to R, for use in scripting applications, see https://linux.die.net/man/1/rscript for more detail.

(base) ➜  R git:(b_test_pr) ✗ cat hello.R
print("hello,world")
(base) ➜  R git:(b_test_pr) ✗ Rscript hello.R
[1] "hello,world"

Install commonly used packages

R installation package comes along with a lot of useful packages, besides that, there are a lot of useful packages available from CRAN.

Here are top 10 most important packages in R for data science.

  • ggplot2
  • data.table
  • dplyr
  • tidyr
  • Shiny
  • plotly
  • knitr
  • mlr3

To install those packages from CRAN, we can just simiply follow below steps.

  • Start R console
  • Call “install.packages(XXX)”

Here is an example:

> install.packages("mlr3")
--- Please select a CRAN mirror for use in this session ---
Secure CRAN mirrors

 1: 0-Cloud [https]
 2: Australia (Canberra) [https]
 3: Australia (Melbourne 1) [https]
 ....
 Selection: 1
also installing the dependencies ‘globals’, ‘listenv’, ‘PRROC’, ‘future’, ‘future.apply’, ‘lgr’, ‘mlbench’, ‘mlr3measures’, ‘mlr3misc’, ‘parallelly’, ‘palmerpenguins’, ‘paradox’

trying URL 'https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/macosx/big-sur-arm64/contrib/4.2/globals_0.16.2.tgz'
...
>> library(mlr3)
> ?mlr3

As above, after installation completes, we can try to run library(<package name>) to verify, and run ?<package name> to see its document.

Reference