ABSTRACT
Students, faculty, and researchers can now obtain comprehensive data analysis software for any modern computer system for free. The popular and well-established R data analysis system is a primary example of this software. The major downside is its complexity, requiring a basic knowledge of programming skills to accomplish data analysis. The author's lessR package extends R by offering about 50 functions for the R environment that markedly simplify data analysis. The purpose of this book is to show how to do data analysis with R enhanced by lessR. This chapter shows how to access and prepare R for data analysis. Also described is the organization of data into a data table required by every data analysis application, including R, free or commercial, and how to create a data table. The chapter describes two data sets analyzed throughout the book.
