First Steps

The first part of this book will get you started using R. Unless you’ve been using R comfortably for several months, resist the tempation to skip through this quickly. We’ve found that one of the biggest hurdles to getting users comfortable with R is getting the software installed and running with a minimum of hassle. The next step is getting folks reconciled to the idea that R is very different from Excel. You can like that, or you can hate that, but you can’t change that. Hopefully, by the end of this section, you’ll be open to the idea that R can accomplish some tasks and it’s something you can add to your tool kit.