Summary

In this chapter, we introduced the book by mentioning its intended audience, as well as our intentions for it, which are to provide examples that you can use to understand how real-world R applications are built using a high-quality code, and the useful guidelines of what to do and not to do when building your own applications.

We also introduced R's basic constructs and prepared the baseline we need to work through the examples developed in the rest of the book. Specifically, we looked at how to work with the console, how to create and use variables, how to work with R basic data types like numerics, characters, and logicals, as well as how to handle special values, and how to make basic use of data structures like vectors, factors, matrices, data frames, and lists. Finally, we showed how to create our own functions and how to provide multiple paths of execution with control structures.

I hope this book is useful to you and that you enjoy reading it.