Goals of This Course

Well, we didn’t even let you get through the introduction without doing some actual R coding! Doing and thinking—these are the main things you should be filling your time with as you go through this course. Doing without thinking would reduce you to just rote memorization of procedures. Thinking without doing would be awfully boring—you would miss the exciting part!

Our goals for this course are as follows:

• First, to learn how to analyze data, using R. We want you to end up well on your way to being truly competent with data.

• Second, to understand the core concepts of the domain—the ideas that will help you make sense of the analyses you produce.

• Third, to prepare you to learn more about statistics in the future. Statistics is a big field. Knowing a little is still useful, but you should feel ready to keep learning after you finish this course.

So, let’s get started!