ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book summarizes the basic statistical techniques associated with the three components in a manner that makes them accessible to students not majoring in statistics. Statistical methods that are used by a wide range of disciplines consist of at least three basic components: experimental design, summarizing data and inferential techniques. The mathematical foundation of the statistical tools routinely used today was developed about two centuries ago by Pierre-Simon Laplace and Carl Friedrich Gauss in a series of remarkable advances. The book focuses on the free (open source) software package R, which within statistics is arguably the most important software development during the last quarter of a century. Many of the R functions are based in part on other R packages available at CRANS.
