R For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Welcome to R For Dummies, the book that helps you learn the statistical programming language R quickly and easily.

We can’t guarantee that you’ll be a guru if you read this book, but you should be able to

• Perform data analysis by using a variety of powerful tools.
• Use the power of R to do statistical analysis and data-processing tasks.
• Appreciate the beauty of using vector-based operations (rather than loops) to do speedy calculations.
• Appreciate the meaning of the following line of code:

  knowledge <- apply(theory, 1, sum)

• Know how to find, download, and use code that has been contributed to R by its very active community of developers.
• Know where to find extra help and resources to take your R coding skills to the next level.
• Create beautiful graphs and visualizations of your data.

About This Book

R For Dummies is an introduction to the statistical programming language known as R. We start by introducing the interface and work our way from the very basic concepts of the language through more sophisticated data manipulation and analysis.

We illustrate every step with easy-to-follow examples. This book contains numerous code snippets, several write-it-yourself functions you can use later on, and complete analysis scripts. All these are for you to try out yourself.

We don’t attempt to give a technical description of how R is programmed internally, but we do focus as much on the why as on the how. R has many features that may seem surprising at first, so we believe ...