The available R engines
There is more than one R distribution available on the market that you can use for free for your advanced analytics projects. In this section, we’ll explore the main details of each of them.
The CRAN R distribution
When it comes to installing the R engine, we almost always think of the open source software environment, par excellence, developed by a collective of contributors over the years known as CRAN R, also called base R (https://cran.r-project.org). To be exact, the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) is a network of web servers and FTP servers around the world whose goal is to preserve multiple identical and up-to-date versions of the R source code and the entire ecosystem of R packages developed by the community, along with all the R documentation.
One of the biggest advantages of CRAN R is its very active community of developers. Their contribution to the creation of new packages on CRAN is invaluable. That’s why if you...
