You can get a free version of R for your computer from a number of sources. The download is about 70MB and setup is fully automatic. Versions for several operating systems can be found on the R web site
Note
the one item you should change from the defaults is to install R into a folder under the root, aka C:\R
You might be asked at several times whether you want to do something (allow access, run a program, save a library, …), always just say yes!
You will need to connect to a reasonably fast internet for these steps.
This will take a few minutes, just wait until the > sign appears.
FOR MAC OS USERS ONLY
There are a few things that are different from MacOS and Windows. Here is one thing you should do:
Download XQuartz - XQuartz-2.7.11.dmg
Open XQuartz
Type the letter R (to make XQuartz run R)
Hit enter Open R Run the command .First()
Then, every command should work correctly.
We will run R using an interface called RStudio. You can download it at RStudio.
R releases new versions about every three months or so. In general it is not necessary to get the latest version every time. Every now and then a package won’t run under the old version, and then it is time to do so. In essence this just means to install the latest version of R from CRAN. More important is to now also update ALL your packages to the latest versions. This is done simply by running
update.packages(ask=FALSE, dependencies=TRUE)