Basic Commands

At it’s most purely distilled level, all the R programming and data analysis that you will ever do reduces to evaluating sequences of expressions. Viewed through one more layer of abstraction, the purpose of these expressions will be to implement some aspect of just two tasks:

  1. Create a new R object
  2. Process an existing R object

That’s it: everything you will ever do with R can be conceptualized as some combination of those two tasks. Of course, I’m being intentionally pedantic. Although, the statement above is technically true, the practical complexity that can arise from programmatically creating and processing abstract objects is virtually limitless.

In this tutorial, we’ll begin at the beginning by introducing the basic building blocks of all your future R analyses. We start by covering the most fundamental commands in the R programming language: the core set of commands from which originates all the myriad complexity R has to offer.

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