We will use R for our data analysis, so we need to know the basics of programming in the R language. R is a full programming language with both functional programming and object-oriented programming features, and learning the complete language is far beyond the scope of this chapter. We return to it later, when we have a little more experience using R. The good news is, though, that to use R for data analysis, we rarely need to do much programming. At least, if you do the right kind of programming, you won’t need much.
For manipulating data—how to do this is the topic of the ...
