R is the programming language that data analysts and statisticians use to make sense of data. It was built for statistics, and it is the language behind countless research papers, dashboards, and data science projects. If you want to analyse data, draw charts, and answer questions with real numbers — or you want to start a career in data science — R is one of the best languages to learn.

How does R work? You write R code in RStudio, the free development tool, and it runs on your data directly. R thinks in vectors and data frames: a data frame is a table, like a spreadsheet, and most of R's work is filtering rows, choosing columns, and summarising groups. The tidyverse, a collection of R packages, gives you a clean set of tools for reading, cleaning, and visualising data. And with ggplot2, you can draw beautiful charts with just a few lines of code.

R is a good fit for beginners because it was designed for people who are not programmers.…