As a follow up to this week’s meeting, the R programming language is a free statistical programing/data analysis language.
You can download the latest version for free from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN)
To get R on your computer you need to download the “binaries” version – that is the executable code . Currently there are versions for Windows, Mac, and LINUX.
Manuals can be found here http://cran.r-project.org/manuals.html
The basic R install is sometime referred to as the “base”. It can do a lot of things already, but a great feature of R is are the add-on “packages.” Packages are small parcels of code or tools for doing specific analyses. There are over 5,000 of these contributed by users from around the world. The “psych” package, for example, is one you might want to add on. This package allows you to things like reliability analysis and item analysis – something that psychology grad students have to do frequently.
R can be a little daunting at first because most things have to be specified using text commands. Once you get a grasp of the basics you can find examples of scripts/commands for most analyses on the R website. There are heaps of introductory tutorials you can find by searching the web, including some follow-along YouTube tutorials.
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