Chapter 4 Introduction to R

4.1 History of R

R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland , New Zealand. Current development of R is managed by the R Development Core Team .

4.2 R Programming Features

R is primarily used for statistical computing, graphics and machine learning. R is available as a free software under GNU(General Public License). R is an interpreted language.
R has a wide selection of packages. Packages are collection of R functions and will typically include a set of functions.
For example if you want to run linear regression you can use R package “lm”" for running linear regression easily. Without packages you may have to write complete function by yourself. I will cover functions in detail in subsequent chapters. There are more than 10,000 R packages that are developed and available online in CRAN. Packages can be installed using following command :-

install.packages(“Package Name”)