0.3 How to use this book

For the best experience we recommend that you read the web version of this book which you can find here. The web version includes a navbar at the top of the page where you can toggle the sidebar on and off , search through the book , change the font, font size and page colour and suggest revisions if you spot a typo or mistake . You can also download a pdf version of our book by clicking on the pdf icon .

We use a few typographical conventions throughout this book.

R code and the resulting output are presented in code blocks in our book.

42 + 1 
## [1] 43

If you’re running R code in the R console it will look a little different from the code above. Code should be entered after the command prompt (>) and the output from code in the console will not be commented with ##.

> 42 + 1 
[1] 43

In the book text we refer to R functions using code font followed by a set of round brackets, i.e. mean() or sd() etc.

We refer to objects that we create using code font without the round brackets, i.e. obj1, obj2 etc.

A series of actions required to access menu commands in RStudio are identified as File -> New File -> R Script which translates to ‘click on the File menu, then click on New File and then select R Script’.

Clickable links to sections in the book or to external websites are highlighted in light blue text, i.e. link.

Links to short ‘how-to’ videos that accompany this book are indicated by a video icon.

Links to exercises can be found at the end of each Chapter and are highlighted by a info icon.