The Book of R

INTRODUCTION

R plays a key role in a wide variety of research and data analysis projects because it makes many modern statistical methods, both simple and advanced, readily available and easy to use. It’s true, however, that a beginner to R is often new to programming in general. As a beginner, you must not only learn to use R for your specific data analysis goals but also learn to think like a programmer. This is partly why R has a bit of a reputation for being “hard”—but rest assured, that really isn’t the case.

A Brief History of R

R is based heavily on the S language, first developed in the 1960s and 1970s by researchers at Bell Laboratories ...