What you need for this book

All the code examples provided in this book should be run in the R console that is to be installed first on a computer. You can download the software for free and find the installation instructions for all major operating systems at http://r-project.org. Although we will not cover advanced topics such as how to use R in Integrated Development Environments, there are awesome plugins for Emacs, Eclipse, vi, or Notepad++ besides other editors, and we can also highly recommend trying RStudio, which is a free and open source IDE dedicated to R.

Apart from a working R installation, we will also use some user-contributed R packages that can be easily installed from the Comprehensive R Archive Network. To install a package, use the install.packages command in the R console, shown as follows:

> install.packages('zoo')

After installation, the package should be also loaded first to the current R session before usage:

> library(zoo)

You can find free introductory articles and manuals on the R homepage, but this book is targeted towards beginners, so no additional R knowledge is assumed from the reader.