R is a powerful and versatile programming language widely utilised by scientists across various disciplines for making sense of data, visualising data and doing computations with data. It offers many mathematical, statistical and graphical methods, making it a powerful tool for scientists. R is open source, meaning that it is freely available to everyone, allowing you to download, use, and even modify the code to suit your specific needs. As such, it is widely used and distributed among the scientific community. Learning how to work with R is essential in today's data-driven world and will enable you to harness its powers for statistical computation and visualization.

RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) for R that provides a user-friendly interface for coding, debugging, and managing R projects. In other words, R-studio is a program that makes it easier for you to work with R. After downloading the software (see the next section Setting up R and RStudio), you only need to open RStudio. R will run in the background.