This is the first of the workshop sections. Here we begin to explore the console environment of R and start touching on some of its capabilities. I will also spend a bit of time explaining the library and package system that is used by R.
In contrast to many other statistical analysis packages, analysis in R is not based on graphic user interface, but is command line-based. When you first start R, a command prompt appears. To get help and overview of R, type help.start() on the command line and press enter. This will start your internet browser (or if working in RStudio, the help tab) and open the main page of the R documentation. If you ever need further help in R you can type either help(fun) or ?fun, where fun is a function or term you want to search for help on.
Let us first start off simply by using R as a calculator.