R - An Introduction to the R Programming Environment

R is an integrated software packages for data processing, calculation and graphical
display with following advantages.

http://www.r-project.org/Rlogo.jpg

• Easily access external data (xsl, csv, txt, html, json, xml, table) from local/remote storages, the Web (URL) or remote database servers (RODBC).
• Process and calculating data represented with arrays (matrices).
• Integrate many statistical and scientific methods as packages for data analysis.
• Present data with various graphical charts.
• Rapidly develop new methods of interactive data analysis. For computationally-intensive tasks, C, C++ and Fortran code can be linked and called at run time. Advanced users can write C code to manipulate R objects directly.

There are about 25 R packages (standard and recommended packages) and numerous extended packages are available through http://CRAN.R-project.org/, the CRAN (Comprehensive R Archive Network) website is a family of mirror sites for downloading extended R packages.

Download R: Windows, MacOS X, Linux versions. R is part of many Linux distributions, you should check with your Linux package management system in addition to the link above.

Using "R for Windows" as an example, just download the base subdirectory for beginners of R.

Install R for the first time

 Start the "R-3.1.2-win.exe" and select the desire option.

I choose English since most of documents are written in English.

Run 32-bit or 64-bit R? Obviously, using the 'native' build, that is the 32-bit version on 32-bit Windows and the 64-bit version of 64-bit Windows. The advantage of a native 64-bit application is that it gets a 64-bit address space and hence can address far more than 4GB (how much depends on the version of Windows, but in principle 8TB). This allows a single process to take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM (if available) and for R's memory manager to more easily handle large objects (in particular those of 1GB or more).

After installed R software, just click the "R icon" on the desktop screen. Note, the UI language is still "Chinese Traditional" although I choose "En" while instalating R.

It's easy to change setting before starting R. Press mouse right-click and select "property (內容)", and add the argument "LANGUAGE=en" after the Rgui.exe.

Next time you start R, the GUI will become English version.

Finally, set the GUI arguments as your desired.

R for Windows FAQ  can make you clear on using R. FAQ and HOWTO Documents  contains information for the three OS platform.