0.1 The aim of this book

This book is a derivative of “An Introduction to R” by Alex Douglas, Deon Roos, Francesca Mancini, Ana Couto & David Lusseau”. I have adapated it in 2022 to make it suitable for students who are getting started with Urban Analytics course and want to have a refresher course in R. As such much of this book is verbatim from Douglas et. al(2022) with no claim to originality. The same license (CC-NC-SA) applies.

The aim of this book is to introduce you to using R, a powerful and flexible interactive environment for statistical computing and research. R in itself is not difficult to learn, but as with learning any new language (spoken or computer) the initial learning curve can be a little steep and somewhat daunting. We have tried to simplify the content of this book as much as possible. It is not intended to cover everything there is to know about R - that would be an impossible task. Neither is it intended to be an introductory statistics course, although you will be using some simple statistics to highlight some of R’s capabilities. The main aim of this book is to help you get over the initial learning hurdle and provide you with the basic skills and experience (and confidence!) to enable you to further your experience in using R.