R in a Nutshell

How This Book Is Organized

I’ve broken this book into five parts:

• Part I, covers the basics of getting and running R. It’s designed to help get you up and running if you’re a new user, including a short tour of the many things you can do with R.

• Part II, discusses the R language in detail. This section picks up where the first section leaves off, describing the R language in detail.

• Part III, covers data processing in R: loading data into R, transforming data, summarizing data, and plotting data. Summary statistics and charts are an important part of statistical analysis, but many laypeople don’t think of these things as statistical analysis. So, I cover these topics without using too much math in order to keep them accessible.

• Part IV, covers statistical tests and models in R.

• Finally, I included an Appendix A describing functions and data sets included with the base distribution of R.

If you are new to R, install R and start with Chapter 3. Next, take a look at Chapter 5 to learn some of the rules of the R language. If you plan to use R for plotting, statistical tests, or statistical models, take a look at the appropriate chapter. Make sure you look at the first few sections of the chapter, because these provide an overview of how all the related functions work. (For example, don’t skip straight to Random forests for regression without reading Example: A Simple Linear Model.)