R from the Beginning

R is a system for statistical computing and graphing. It consists of a language and a software environment. R has been widely used for academic and research purposes and is increasingly being deployed in corporate environments. R is a freely available software, under a GNU license, and is supported by the R Development Core Team. The strength of R is its extensibility through the packages developed by the community of R users, available through the CRAN repository, where support is also given. Furthermore, it is available for a wide range of platforms, including Windows, Mac, and Linux. In this chapter, we explain the basic background to help readers get used to R.