The R Book, 3rd Edition

1Getting Started

1.1 Navigating the book

The material covered in this book has been arranged by topic. The first few chapters cover the essentials, including basic technical knowledge (Chapter 2), the fundamentals of (Chapter 3), and data handling in (Chapter 4). Subsequent chapters deal with statistical procedures, including graphics (Chapters 5 and 6), statistical testing (Chapter 9), and common statistical models (from Chapter 10).

To make navigating the book easier, the following conventions will be used:

• New terms are highlighted in bold when first used;
• functions and function arguments written in‐line are highlighted in red, for example the plot () function and the pch argument (note the use of the round brackets when referring to functions);
• Stand‐alone code is written in red, with output in blue, for example:

  

• Datasets, variable names, model names, and so on, are written in typewriter font;
• packages (see Section 1.6) are highlighted in blue, for example MASS.

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