Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

R for Data Analysis in easy steps - R Programming essentials

Rate this book
The R language is widely used by statisticians for data analysis, and the popularity of R programming has therefore increased substantially in recent years. The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) gathers increasing amounts of data that can be analyzed to gain useful insights into trends. R for Data Analysis in easy steps has an easy-to-follow style that will appeal to anyone who wants to produce graphic visualizations to gain insights from gathered data. R for Data Analysis in easy steps begins by explaining core programming principles of the R programming language, which stores data in “vectors” from which simple graphs can be plotted. Next, the book describes how to create “matrices” to store and manipulate data from which graphs can be plotted to provide better insights. This book then demonstrates how to create “data frames” from imported data sets, and how to employ the “Grammar of Graphics” to produce advanced visualizations that can best illustrate useful insights from your data. R for Data Analysis in easy steps contains separate chapters on the major features of the R programming language. There are complete example programs that demonstrate how to create Line graphs, Bar charts, Histograms, Scatter graphs, Box plots, and more. The code for each R script is listed, together with screenshots that illustrate the actual output when that script has been executed. The free, downloadable example R code is provided for clearer understanding. By the end of this book you will have gained a sound understanding of R programming, and be able to write your own scripts that can be executed to produce graphic visualizations for data analysis. You need have no previous knowledge of any programming language, so it's ideal for the newcomer to computer programming.

192 pages, Paperback

Published March 13, 2018

14 people are currently reading
31 people want to read

About the author

Mike McGrath

87 books5 followers
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
4 (19%)
4 stars
12 (57%)
3 stars
5 (23%)
2 stars
0 (0%)
1 star
0 (0%)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Profile Image for Mohan Vemulapalli.
1,108 reviews
August 27, 2022
"R for Data Analysis in easy steps - R Programming essentials" is a concise well written introduction to the R programming language that will be suitable for most readers but may be too rudimentary for experienced programmers or data scientists.

The book is mostly a high level survey of the most basic elements of using R. As such it covers fundamental programming concepts from an R perspective and some simple uses of the language.

Completing this book will not result in mastery of the R language but it will provide a solid understanding of the most basic concepts and skills and a foundation for further study.

Technical details are kept to a minimum and this book simplifies complex topics. For the most part this is done well, such as in the case of vectors, which are explained in a very accessible manner. There are other case where this is not the case though, such as with the coverage of statistics functions and plotting functionality.



128 reviews1 follower
June 9, 2023
Covers the basics, it has a fair number of annoying errors and a few dated references, most notably using <- instead of = for assignment??! What the fuck, why make things look incomprehensible??

However, it is a decent getting started how-to for the absolute beginner, and it does convey the utility of R.
Profile Image for Michael Bee.
60 reviews10 followers
September 20, 2025
Great starter book

The author's sample scripts are available from the publisher some of the syntax is deprecated ... and some scripts minor errors ... but overall a very helpful introduction to R
Profile Image for Robert Campbell.
Author 9 books17 followers
October 26, 2019
A concise and well-structured resource for anyone learning R. Clear, easy to follow instructions.
Profile Image for Ben.
2,734 reviews232 followers
July 5, 2022
I have been doing data analysis for years, but somehow only dabbled in R.

This book helped me really get some more out of R and do some pretty powerful data manipulation.

Would recommend!

4.0/5
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.