R is a powerful and widely used open source software and programming environment for data analysis. Companies across the globe use R as an essential tool for various types of analysis to get key insights from data and to make key decisions. R was developed on the base of S programming language, which was originally developed by John Chambers.

R developed started in early 1990s. Another version was released in 1997. After that version 1.0 was released in the year 2000 and version 2.0 in year 2004. And, in 2013 version 3.0 was released. R was mainly developed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland. They developed this as a free statistical involvement to teach their students, but when it started gaining popularity they promoted this R language. Currently, there is R development core team which is taking care of its growth. R is generally treated as a statistical software package with great statistical operational capabilities. Moreover, this free and open source Statistical package also compares well with other popular commercial packages; such as SAS, and SPSS'. Over the period R has evolved as a free programming language and environment. And now, R is not only used for statistical purpose but it is used in variety of applications.

People who wants to grow up their knowledge on R programming language need to have knowledge on computer basics and having knowledge other programming is an advantage to the beginner. There are various graphical user interface based applications out there for various kind of data analysis tasks. In fact, many GUI based applications are also built on R framework. These applications can perform various data analysis tasks with few clicks.

• R programming has the capability to interact with procedures of native languages.
• R is a open source programming language.
• R programming language has the storage and data handling facility.