Preface My aim in writing this short book is to enable an average student like me to graph and chart the data in an understandable and analytically correct manner using R. I have a wild dream, that high school students to Post-Doctoral researchers of all fields will use R and that this book will help them learn the first steps, so I decided not to write extra and not to repeat what was already available on the internet/print. You may feel that the book is fast paced, Yes it is, it is meant to be read sitting before a PC and to enter the commands. Practice makes perfect and the best way to learn R is to work with it and ask questions when you don’t get the results. Very special thanks to the staff of NIPA for agreeing to publish this book in color. Hope this book on R will help you to start on a journey of discovery with R. Good Luck and God Bless, I hope that soon I will be able to see charts based on this book get published in research journals. One request please work on the code and try till you succeed.

R is a software package / language / environment for statistical analysis and graphics. It Reads Any Type of Data *.txt, .csv, .dat, etc.), You can also scrape (collect) data from websites and execute SQL queries It Supports Large Data Sets. Reproducibility.  R allows you to add comments to your scripts to make it clear to you and others on what you’re doing as data and analysis are separated in R. As R is fully free you can use the latest version on any / as many computers so you and your student can work on the same version. You can use R on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Unix. Anyone (Including You) Can Contribute Packages to the Community to Improve its Functionality. You can download R from : http://cran.r-project.org. R has a command line interface and that is a huge hurdle for many users, but believe us you will find that using a command line is also easy. However we strongly recommend the R Studio text editor for working with R scripts (http://www.rstudio.com/ide/download).