What is R?
The second goal of this course is for you to become familiar with the use of R; we may use Microsoft Excel sporadically.
R is like a Rolls-Royce, the king among softwares; a revolutionary free program that has come to become popular in many disciplines; and there are several reasons for this:
Most importantly, it is free.
By its nature of being open-source, thousands of people around the world have contributed their work in the form of “packages”, which has allowed R to increase in scope, being used for almost anything from doing statistical analysis, to figures, to movies, to animations, to videos, you name it.
R Packages are like the phone apps that you download and install in your phone and that you use to do a diversity of things. Currently, there are more than 16,000 R-Packages, each providing different tools to do almost anything.
There is also a very large group of users willing to help you if you face any struggle. Oh, and they will help you for free, as well.
Onlined platforms such as Stackoverflow have blogs of people helping each other with any issue about R. Every question is nicely cataloged, and at times there may even be alternative solutions to the same problem.
The reality is that with so many millions of people using R, chances are that if you have a problem, someone else probably had the same problem before, and thus, their solution most likely is already ready for you in the web.
Finally, R can handle the load. In R, you can run codes as small as those run in a calculator to as large as those ones run in super computers.
No matter what professional path you take in life, you will have an use for R.