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. You've installed R on your computer and now you can go ahead, you can just use it directly, or if you want to, you can install an interface, like R Studio, if you like.One of the first steps to learning R is to have it downloaded and installed on your computer. They're in alphabetical order, so I'll just scroll down to R and there it is and there you have it. So I can just go to my applications folder, which is right here. Now it's finished, I can hit Close, then it will be in my applications folder. It'll start installing the files on your computer. Then you can just click Install here and you might have to type in your administrator password, so just go ahead and do that.

The software license agreement is the GNU General Public License Version 2, so you should agree to the license, after having read it, of course. I'll click Continue here and this is just the description of what's going to get installed. I'm just going to open up here, the package, and you can see it will start the installer, and it will guide you through all of the steps you need to install R. It might take a few minutes depending on the speed of your internet connection, so just be patient. So we can go to Download R for the Mac, you want to download this package file here, so just click on this and you'll see that the download meter will start going. So we're going to download the Mac platform here. So the first thing you need to do is open your web browser and go to CRAN, this is the Comprehensive R Archive Network, and you'll see that there are a number of options for you to download here for different platforms. It's a very simple process, it only takes a few steps.

In this video, I'm going to briefly show how you can install R on the Mac.

Download rstudio for mac