Chapter 2 R programming

R is a programming language most commonly used within the statistical and machine learning community. This chapter will review some of the elements of R programming that will be used in later chapters. Do not expect this chapter to be exhaustive or self-contained. It is intended to give a quick refresh of R for users that have at least some experience with this programming language. There are many topics and concepts which are fundamental but will not be reviewed in this chapter. However, you should aim to master the topics included in this chapter since they will appear again later on in these notes. There are many other resources if you want to have a more in-depth look into R programming.

• The books of Hadley Wickham are surely a great starting point and are all available here.

• If you are unsure on how to do something with R, Google it!!! The community of R users is so wide that surely someone else has already asked your same question.

• The R help is extremely useful and comprehensive. If you want to know more about a function, suppose it is called function, you can type ?function.