Running R locally, on your own machine, is helpful for smaller analyses and for developing and testing larger jobs. One of the strengths of R is that it is operating system agnostic. It can be run on Windows, Linux and Mac machines equally well, so analysis scripts are generally easy to run on different machines.

Keep these R facts in mind:

• Capitalization matters, so that a variable called temp is different from one called Temp.
• When specifying the path of a file the direction of the slash also matters. Windows uses backslashes (\) and Linux uses forward slashes (/). Since the backslash is an escape sequence, you will need two of them in the Windows paths, e.g., .