about this book
Who needs this book?
You do, of course. Given that you’re reading this, I’m guessing that you have some data (stored as a spreadsheet, perhaps) and aren’t quite sure what to do with it. That’s fine; great, even. Maybe you want to learn something from your data. Maybe you want to find a new way to interact with it. Maybe you want to make a picture out of it. All great goals, but I’m also guessing you want to learn how to do some programming for the first time.
I’m not going to assume you know how to program already, or that you are familiar with the jargon. Perhaps you’ve already picked up a few programming books and been scared off by how fast they fly through the introductory material trying to get you up to speed on every nuance of the way that particular language works. Not here. We’ll take things slow and work on a lot of examples together so that by the time we get to the end you’ll be comfortable with doing what you want to do with your data.
I’m also not going to even mention statistics. That’s a topic for someone else to cover. If you don’t have a background in statistics, don’t worry; it’s not a requirement here. We’ll be looking at R programming, not statistics (which it, at least, is very good at).