Introduction to RStudio

RStudio is an IDE for rapid development of R. Just like R, RStudio is free and is available to download at http://www.rstudio.com. It runs on all the major openerating system - Window, Linux, Mac OS X.

This IDE has four panels:

1. Console - usual R console used to type R commands and see outputs. 
2. Workspace and History panel - Workspace tab shows all the active objects in the current session. The history tab keeps a record of all previous commands.
3. File, plot, package, and help panel - The file tab shows all the files and folders in the default workspace. Package tab displays list of packages. Plot tab displays all the graphs. 
4. Editor and Data view panel - This panel provides a multiple document interface useful to open/edit many documents at different tab. RStudio can open/edit source files of many programming languages. Also it provides visualization of data similar to the spreadsheet in excel.

Useful features of RStudio:

Editor:

• Auto-complete
• Syntax highlighting
• Block comment/Uncomment
• Code wrapping
• Close paranthesis and quotation highlighting
• Expand/collapse block of code
• Tab completion

Workspace:

• Clicking on data frame object cause it to display in tabular format.

Plot:

• Copy/Paste from plot view
• View previously generated graphs

Debugging:

• Visual debugger.
• Editor breakpoints
• Debugger stepping tools
• View object status while debugging