Learning R | Part 1 | Basics of R & RStudio

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

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.

References → Udemy

Thanks for reading. In my next article, I’ll be explaining the usage of variables and functions.

Update : You can read the Part 2 here.

Drop your questions below. Suggestions are welcomed. 🙌