What you need for this book

You need the R statistical package, available free as an open source download from CRAN (https://www.r-project.org/). This book used R version 3.3.1 for Windows. You will get the same results using the macOS or Linux software.

Optionally, it is also recommended that you use RStudio Desktop, an open source user interface that works with R (https://www.rstudio.com/). This book used version 0.99.903 for Windows. It is also available for macOS and Linux.

Lastly, you will need to install a variety of R packages to perform the various analyses. All these are all freely available using the install.packages() function within R. You can get a refresher on installing packages in Appendix C, R Packages Used in the Book.

This book provides code using the R statistical programming language. Perhaps it has been a while since you last used or learned R. If that is the case, then you may find the following material quite useful. It provides a listing of R skills that you should know before working on the use cases provided in each of the chapters.

Video links (Peng, 2015; Peng, 2014; LawrenceStats, 2016; Peng, 2012) for each skill provide an explanation of techniques that you may want to review before continuing: