Getting Up and Running with R

Abstract

Welcome to the first chapter on the book that covers every pirate’s favorite programming language and statistics package, R. With that very bad joke out of the way, let’s talk about what this book is: your Practical R recipe book for three broad areas – research, productivity, and automation. In the first part of this book, I’ll give you the essentials to getting up and running with R and apply those to two research projects you might find useful in your work: a market research study and a psychological process-tracing study. In the second part, I’ll talk about how R can be used in your workday to enhance your productivity – less data science, more useful scripting environment. And finally, in the third part, I’ll use R to automate some seriously complex tasks, turning R into your personal assistant through two projects in Chapters 9 and 10. Along the way, you’ll find that R fits in many different areas of your life and that no job is likely too big for it!