How to do it...

Installing R is easy; use the following steps:

1. Go to Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and download the latest release of R for your particular operating system:
   • For Windows, go to http://cran.r-project.org/bin/windows/base/
   • For Linux, go to http://cran.us.r-project.org/bin/linux/
   • For Mac OS X, go to http://cran.us.r-project.org/bin/macosx/

As of June 2017, the latest release of R is Version 3.4.0 from April 2017.

1. Once downloaded, follow the excellent instructions provided by CRAN to install the software on your respective platform. For both Windows and Mac, just double-click on the downloaded install packages.

1. With R installed, go ahead and launch it. You should see a window similar to that shown in the following screenshot:

1. An important modification of CRAN is available at https://mran.microsoft.com/ and it is a Microsoft contribution to R software. In fact, the authors are a fan of this variant and strongly recommend the Microsoft version as it has been demonstrated on multiple occasions that MRAN version is much faster than the CRAN version and all codes run the same on both the variants. So, there is a bonus reason to use MRAN R versions.
2. You can stop at just downloading R, but you will miss out on the excellent Integrated Development Environment (IDE) built for R, called RStudio. Visit http://www.rstudio.com/ide/download/ to download RStudio, and follow the online installation instructions.

1. Once installed, go ahead and run RStudio. The following screenshot shows one of our author's customized RStudio configurations with the Console panel in the upper-left corner, the editor in the upper-right corner, the current variable list in the lower-left corner, and the current directory in the lower-right corner: