1.1 R the 18th letter: R for beginners

A section from the blog *R for beginners* in English.

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Several years a go, you might think of R only as the 18th alphabet. But now, R can also mean “a trend language”. More than 4000 add-on packages have been uploaded on the CRAN server (I’ll talk about CRAN a bit later). Each maintained-packages has organised miling list with hundreds to thousands.A website called R-evolution shows the package submitted annually and chart of developer who have been maintained more than 10 packages.    Many active R user group are also hosted in major social media like Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  The following are my recommended list:

• on Google+: Statistics and R Communities
• on LinkedIn: R Programming Group
• on Facebook: R Programming Group
• on Twitter: One R tip a day (@RLangTIp) or just use hastag “#rstats”
• on Stackoverflow:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/r

R meetups are also organised as a meeting point of R users globally. To date, as many as 155 meetups with 46.607 participants, in 127 cities in 31 countries, have been hosted as mentioned in theR user group.

Intentionally built as a robust statistical tools, R now has been developed for many applications. It can even be used to manipulate and visualise GIS dataset. The use of R are far more increasing unstoppably in “Big Data” era. Hence no matter in what field you are, as long as it involves data analysis, you can use R.

The application of R has developed rapidly, as it connects to another major language like Python (not the serpent) and Ruby (not the gemstone). One of the example is R markdown. It is a flavour of markdown that natively installed in Rstudio installation. Markdown is a markup language, just like LaTeX and HTML, but with easier to remember syntax. By using R-markdown you can embed R code and its result in one readable document. Previously, R markdown can only be converted to HTML via knitr package. But in the newest R studio, you can now convert Markdown to “`pdf“`  and even “`docx“` format. Neat isn’t. But save the thought for now, I’ll talk more about it as we move further.