How to Download R

This post was adapted from material in my current book project, R Programming in Plain English. You may download a PDF of all completed material for this book here.

Before you can download RStudio, which is the far better way to use the R programming language, you'll need to first download R base. I'll show you how to do that in this post.

To download R, go to this website: https://www.r-project.org/

You will then have to go through a series of options and screens to download R. Don’t worry. I’ll explain each of them along the way.

First, you’ll select the “download R” link in the first paragraph.

Second, you’ll select a CRAN mirror. Select the one that’s closest to you. For example, I live in Lawrence, Kansas. That conveniently has a CRAN mirror in my own city. If you live in Melbourne, Australia, you’ll select the mirror hosted by the University of Melbourne.

Don’t worry. There’s not much difference to the user in these mirrors. It simply helps optimize your ability to download packages from a nearby source, rather than from some other country in the world. This isn’t a big deal for a small time programmer or researcher, but it’s beneficial for large scale operations to carefully choose their mirror.

Third, you’ll select the option for your operating system:

That will take you to a page where you can select the latest release:

Download and install the latest release.

After that, you can open the R base user interface!

The base version of R is a simple user interface. Sometimes this is nice because you don’t get overwhelmed with information overload. However, RStudio is a much better tool for programming in R. Find out how to download and use that tool here.