Learn R interactively with the swirl package

R, the statistical computing language of choice and what I use the most, can seem odd to those new to the language or programming. And I think this what holds a lot of people back and what keeps people stuck in limited software. The swirl package for R helps beginners get over that first hurdle by teaching you within R itself.

swirl is a software package for the R statistical programming language. Its purpose is to teach users statistics and R simultaneously and interactively. It attempts to do this in the most authentic learning environment possible by guiding users through interactive lessons directly within the R console.

Assuming you installed R on your computer already, install the package (and the other packages it depends on), make a call to swirl(), and you get a guide through the basics.