Introduction to the R Programming Language
Christopher David Desjardins, Okan Bulut · 2018
This chapter provides a brief introduction to the R programming language that is used throughout the Handbook of Educational Measurement and Psychometrics Using R . It introduces R and shows the readers how to download and install both R and R Studio for Windows, Mac, and Linux. A default R installation comes with a set of packages and functions that allow us to run various statistical models, create visualizations, and organize data. However, we need or want to install an additional R package to perform a specialized analysis, to use a more advanced, customizable graphical visualization framework, or to more efficiently manage and organize our data. There are three common repositories where authors of R packages can host their packages: Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN), GitHub, and Bioconductor. The CRAN website provides precompiled binaries of the base R system and contributed packages for Windows, Mac, and Linux.