
Chapter 1
Introducing R
1.1 Introduction
The purpose of this monograph is to provide a reference for scientists and
programmers working on problems in bioinformatics and computational bi-
ology. It may also appeal to programmers who want to improve their pro-
gramming skills or programmers who have been working in bioinformatics
and computational biology but are familiar with languages other than R. A
reasonable level of programming skill is presumed as is some familiarity with
some of the basic tasks that need to b e carried out in bioinformatics. We
concentrate on programming tools and there is no discussion of either graph-
ics or of the multitude