I have written a couple articles over the past few months on using R with hockey data (see here and here), but both of those articles were focused on intermediate techniques and presumed beginner knowledge of R. In contrast, this article is for the complete beginner. We’ll go through the steps of downloading and setting up R and then, with the use of a sample hockey data set, learn the very basics of R for exploring and visualizing data.

One of the wonderful things about using R is that it’s a flexible, growing language, meaning that there are often many different ways to get to the same, correct result. The examples below are meant to be a gentle introduction to different parts of R, but please know that this really only scratches the surface of what’s available.

The code used for this tutorial (which also includes more detail and more examples) is available on our Github here.

Downloading R and Getting Set Up