All the codes examples provided in this book should be run in the R console that is to be installed first on your computer. You can download the software for free and find the installation instructions for all major operating systems at http://r-project.org. Although we will not cover advanced topics such as how to use R in Integrated Development Environment, there are awesome plugins for Emacs, Eclipse, vi, or Notepad++ besides other editors, and we also highly recommend that you try RStudio, which is a free and open source IDE dedicated to R.

Apart from a working R installation, we will also use some user-contributed R packages that can be easily installed from the Comprehensive A Archive Network. To install a package, use the install.packages command in the R console, shown as follows:

> install.packages('Quantmod')

After installation, the package should also be loaded first to the current R session before usage:

> library (Quantmod)

You can find free introductory articles and manuals on the R home page.