Chapter 1 Introduction

In recent years it has become quite fashionable to deprecate statistics11 or for statisticians themselves to be somewhat self-deprecating. This image represents a degree of push back!

The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the R ecosystem along with some motivating examples. In addition, you will be introduced to some basic R syntax and work on your first real world data problem.

Note, we will focus on the basics of how R works and become comfortable interacting with RStudio. Once you have some mastery of these tools then we can start to process and analyse data in powerful ways.

Remember, if you haven’t already, you need to install R and RStudio on your laptop. This is described in the Getting Ready chapter. We will access R via the RStudio IDE12.

  1. Along the lines of “Lies, damn lies and statistics”, an oft repeated dictum erroneously attributed to the British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli.↩︎

  2. IDE is an acronym for integrated development environment which is any software tool that helps programmers develop software code efficiently combining many useful features.↩︎