A Survivor's Guide to R - 9781483346731

The Survivor's Guide to R provides a gentle, but thorough, introduction to R. It is an ideal supplement to any introductory statistics text or a practical field guide for those who want to use the powerful R language for statistical analysis in their own research. The book focuses on providing students with the real-world R skills that are often hard to get to in statistics classes: basic data management and manipulation, and working with R graphics. The book is designed to get students with little or no background in statistics or programming started on R within the context of a statistics class, and to ensure that they have acquired functional R skills that they can continue to use as they move on to their own projects.

The book begins with a straightforward approach to understanding R objects, and then moves systematically through the use of R to transform, sort, and aggregate data; to work with complex textual and date/time data; and to effectively build on R's default graphics capabilities to produce highly customized and effective graphics. It focuses on working with real-world data, with - on reading data in different formats and the challenges of missing data.

This book is intended for those with little to no statistics or programming experience---students and other new users who are likely to find their first encounter with R more than a little intimidating. It is written in an accessible and sympathetic style that makes minimal assumptions about user skills, and provides frequent warnings about common pitfalls that must be avoided along the road to R mastery.