This chapter covered getting R and RStudio downloaded and some basics of working with R via RStudio. You should be able to read a data set into R and run some basic functions, all done using the RStudio interface. If you are struggling with this, you should seek additional help with these technical issues so that you are ready for more complicated statistical methods that are going to be encountered in the following chapters. For most assignments, we will give you a seed of the basic R code that you need and then you will modify it to work on your data set of interest. As mentioned previously, the way everyone learns R is by starting with some example code that does most of what you want to do and then you modify it. If you can complete the Practice Problems that follow, you are well on your way to learning to use R.
The statistical methods in this chapter were minimal and all should have been review. They involved a quick reminder of summarizing the center, spread, and shape of distributions using numerical summaries of the mean and SD and/or the min, Q1, median, Q3, and max and the histogram and boxplot as graphical summaries. We revisited the ideas of symmetry and skew. But the main point was really to get a start on using R to provide results you should be familiar with from your previous statistics experience(s).