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Introduction

With more than 10 years experience programming in R, I’ve had the luxury of being able to spend a lot of time trying to figure out and understand how the language works. This book is my attempt to pass on what I’ve learned so that you can quickly become an effective R programmer. Reading it will help you avoid the mistakes I’ve made and dead ends I’ve gone down, and will teach you useful tools, techniques, and idioms that can help you to attack many types of problems. In the process, I hope to show that, despite its frustrating quirks, R is, at its heart, an elegant and beautiful language, well tailored for data analysis and statistics.

If you are new to R, you might wonder what makes learning such a quirky language worthwhile. ...

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