Guided Notes
Introduction to R
Vectors, and R's statistics-first design.
R was built specifically for statistical computing — its core data type, the vector, is a sequence of values, and most operations work on entire vectors at once without an explicit loop.
Assignment traditionally uses `<-` instead of `=` (though `=` also works): `age <- 36`. This is a stylistic convention specific to R's history, not a functional requirement.
R's package ecosystem (installed via `install.packages()`) is enormous for statistics and data visualization — packages like ggplot2 and dplyr are considered near-essential in practice.