The road ahead

Now that we know what R is and we have discussed some good alternatives, we will have a look at what speaks for learning R. There are many good reasons to learn R! In the next section of the book I will present ten of them, and we will also get hands-on with R. We will skip over some details for the sake of showing you the whole spectrum of what R has to offer and providing you with knowledge that is practically useful in as little time as possible.

We will use modern R with RStudio, RMarkdown the Tidyverse — more about that later. This will help us to focus on data analysis quickly, without worrying to much about some of the more technical aspects of programming.

Overview

Here are the 10 things we will look at:

1. Free and open source

We will learn about free and open source software and why it is great.

2. Easy to get started

We will install R and RStudio, setup an RStudio project, and start interacting with R in the console and by writing our first script.

3. A language made for data analysis

We will get to know the fundamental data types and data structures of R.

4. Well-documented

We will learn how to get help in R.

5. Expandable

We will learn how to add additional functions to R by installing packages and we will learn how to load data into R.

6. Powerful data wrangling functions

We will see how to transform data to prepare it for data analysis, join data.

7. Powerful data visualization functions

We will make a complex statistical graph.

8. Powerful statistical methods

We will run a statistical model.

9. Encourages reproducible research

We will make our analysis reproducible.

10. An awesome community

We will talk about where to find other R users and how to continue learning.

Conventions

Code formatting

In the text, names of R packages will look like this: {tidyverse}. R code will appear inline like this print("Hello R!") or in a box, followed by its output like this:

print("Hello R!")

[1] "Hello R!"

Callout Boxes

There are three different types of callout boxes:

At the beginning of each chapter, I will list the things we are going to do and learn. You can use these to check your prior knowledge. Feel free to skip chapters that won’t provide any new insights for you.

This is an info box. It expands on a previous point with more details. It is not essential to read these, but it could help you to see the connections between concepts.

Exercise 0.1 This is an exercise. Do these to deepen your understanding. Can you figure out how to reveal the solution in the box below?

print("This is the solution")

Data is singular

The word “data” will be used as a singular mass noun, as in “The data looks wonderful!”. I apologize to those whose grammatical intuition this offends. I just cannot help it!