What is RStudio?

RStudio is a free and open-source software solution that offers the possibility to use an integrated development environment for R, a programming language. Although R was original developed for statistical computing and graphics, its use has expanded beyond that.

RStudio is useful for those already familiar with basic R, who would like to take advantage of its intuitive, interactive and user-friendly interface, those who would like to learn to code in R but have been struggling with its basic command-line interface or those who have not used R before.

RStudio is available in different formats: RStudio Desktop is a desktop application, free to download and use in your own computer, while RStudio Server runs on a remote server and allows you to access RStudio using a web browser. In any case, RStudio offers the opportunity to run R code and use R functions and packages through a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Organized in different panels, the interface increases and eases the accessibility, in one single space, to scripts, code, files or plots. For the rest of this course, we will use the desktop application.

In the next step you will learn how to install RStudio. You will also find links to the prerequisite course, alongside screencasts on how to use RStudio interface. Please familiarise yourself with RStudio before we use it to visualise and analyse the data in this course.