RStudio at a glance

Like R, RStudio is a free and open source project. Founded by JJ Allaire, RStudio is also a company that sells services related to their open source product, such as consulting and training.

RStudio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for R. The term IDE comes from the software industry and refers to a tool that makes it easy to develop applications in one or more programming languages. Typical IDEs offer tools to easily write and document code, compile and perform tests, and offer integration with a version control tool.

RStudio integrates the R environment, a highly advanced text editor, R's help system, version control, and much more into a single application. RStudio does not perform any statistical operations; it only makes it easier for you to perform such operations with R. Most importantly, RStudio offers many facilities that make working reproducibly a lot easier.

The following table gives an overview of some of the most important features of RStudio that you will learn to use with this book:

Features	Description
Integration of the R console	Type commands directly in the R console within RStudio.
Code execution	Directly execute code from your script file.
Syntax highlighting	Color (possibly self-defined) keywords and functions for easy reading.
Bracket support	Matching brackets are highlighted upon selection. When typing a bracket "[", brace "(", curly brace or single or double quote, Rstudio autocompletes it for you.
Command completion	Press Tab halfway while typing a command and RStudio shows a menu of matching R functions. When a function is chosen, its arguments and "help" can be shown as well.
Keyboard shortcuts	Common tasks can be accessed quickly by pressing a key or key combination.
Help integration	RStudio allows for browsing and searching R's native help files, and offers context-related help as well.
Object browser	You can inspect every object defined in the running R session.
History browser	RStudio makes it easy to see what commands you used and re-execute them.
Code navigation	Jump from the use of a function to its definition. Jump from code in a report to the code in the source.
Data viewer	A spreadsheet-like view of tables (data.frames).
Data import menus	For some of the most common data types RStudio has a menu that generates the R read command for you.
Graphics integration	Zoom, manipulate, and export graphics interactively.
Project management	Easily switch between several projects.
Version control	RStudio integrates the popular version control systems git and svn.
Document generation	Generate pdf, html, or other report formats using RMarkdown, Sweave, or knitr with the push of a button.
Publishing	Publish your reports and scripts online at Rpubs.com so that others may learn from your examples.

Readers with some programming experience might wonder why a feature such as debugging support is not in the list. The answer is that it is just not there yet. RStudio is continuously being improved and updated, and according to the forums at RStudio's web pages, support for debugging is certainly on the to-do list of the makers.