What is the R programming language? Wikipedia says: “R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is used among data miners, bioinformaticians, and statisticians for data analysis and developing statistical software. Users have created packages to augment the functions of the R language.”

w3schools has a tutorial on R Language.

YouTube Videos

Here is a beginner video on R called R programming for ABSOLUTE beginners by R Programming 101, which is Greg Poulson. This could be one of the first video you watch on R after you’ve installed R. It’s just over 14 minutes long.

At YouTube, the R Programming 101 has a channel with a beginner playlist that’s called R Programming for Beginners. It has 17 videos. Each video is about 8 minutes long, but some are much shorter or longer than that.

Here is a short beginner video on the RStudio environment. RStudio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for R. The name of the video is RStudio for the Total Beginner and it’s by HRanalytics101.com. It’s about 6 minutes long. It introduces the four panels in RStudio: source, console, environment and the lower-right panel has tabs for Help, Packages, Plots and others.

Here is a crash course in R. It’s one hour and covers a lot. The YouTube video is called R programming in one hour – a crash course for beginners and it’s by R Programming 101, which is Mr. Greg Martin.

There is a very thorough introductory tutorial on R. The YouTube video is called R Programming Tutorial – Learn the Basics of Statistical Computing by freeCodeCamp.org. It’s presented by Barton Poulson and is 2 hours and 10 minutes long.

Beginner Datasets

Are you looking for a dataset to start with? How about data on three types of penguins? Palmer Penguins. The palmerpenguins data contains size measurements for three penguin species observed on three islands in the Palmer Archipelago, Antarctica.