About this book

This is an introductory book written to accompany the course of the same title: An Introduction to Programming with R. The course and book introduce the R statistical software to readers/students with minimal prior exposure to programming. We aim to prepare you to carryout a data analysis and to write simple functions. The focus is on the computational model that underlies the R language with the goal of providing a foundation for further coding.

Topics include data types and structures, such as vectors, data frames and lists; the REPL evaluation model; function calls, argument matching, lazy evaluation, and environments; writing simple functions and control flow. Tools for reading, analyzing, and plotting data are also covered, including data input/output, the formula language, and graphics.