What are some tips for someone who is learning how to use Cygwin and R studio

Cygwin is a way to get a command-line interface on Windows that works a lot like other operating systems like Linux or macOS. For that reason, you could look for some resources on learning to use the Linux command line like:

• Taking a class on CodeAcademy: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-the-command-line/
• Reading a free online book like https://www.tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/Bash-Beginners-Guide.html (though that will have a lot more detail than you'll need to finish your project)
• Googling terms like "cygwin tutorial" or "cygwin getting started" could help, especially with installation, but again a lot of these seem to veer off into a lot of details that probably won't help you right away

If you have access to Windows 10, I would suggest using the Windows Subsystem for Linux instead of Cygwin. You can find some instructions on how to use that here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about . The benefit is that you'll be using Linux directly, which will help make a lot more resources available to you directly – I believe more people use Linux than use Cygwin – but that option is only available on the latest version of Windows.

As for learning R, I found a few resources that you might consider:

• EdX has a few links to free online courses on how to use R: https://www.edx.org/learn/r-programming
• CodeAcademy also has a course on learning R: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-r

Vincent's suggestion is also a good one: if you have a choice in what tool you are able to use, you could try numpy (the part of python that works like R). If you're looking to solve a particular problem, though, I wouldn't worry too much about which tool you use – the more practice you get with R the easier it will be to learn numpy later, and vice versa.

And finally, good luck! Getting the computer to answer your question is often a lot of work, but once you finally find just the right way to ask it can also be very rewarding :)

Cygwin is a very useful tool for using unix/linux-type scripts in a Windows environment, however it is not able to run Linux binaries. It gives a shell prompt (bash, csh, etc.) and various unix utilities like grep, sed, and so on. When installing Cygwin, definitely go over all the various options/programs available.

I would recommend switching to Python instead of R. Python's popularity is significantly higher and versatile. Everything R does, Python can do as well.

https://www.kdnuggets.com/2017/09/python-vs-r-data-science-machine-learning.html

I've used both and recognized that I can do data analytics and automation using Python and felt that R was much more limiting.