ces0491
commented
1 year ago Hey @Rongbo-jin, I found this thread from Mara Averick to be super useful. She uses the analogy of a car, where R is the engine and RStudio is the dashboard. The engine makes your car go but the instruments in the dashboard give you the tools to control the engine in a user-friendly way. https://community.rstudio.com/t/differentiating-r-from-rstudio/8009
In the "Before we Start" episode, the materials did a very good job in explaining what is R and RStudio. But I do think the explanation is too technical for social scientists. I persoanlly a political scientist. I was very confused about why I need to install both R and RStudio to make it work. We should emphasize more on the difference between R and RStudio. I think a lot of people in social science have very limited language in coding so just explaining RStudio as an IDE--Integrated Development Environment does not make a lot of sense to me when I started to learn R. People should know R actually is still runninng when they run their codes on RStudio.