Chapter 1 Introduction

Welcome! to the Companion Website for the book Insights from Data with R – An Introduction for the Life and Environmental Sciences

Insights was authored by the members of R4ALL, an organisation specialising in teaching R to those who’ve never used it. And to folk using R already but want to improve their foundation and workflow.

The Preface Chapter of Insights, here is a PDF of the Preface Chapter, describes features of the book, such as its aims, content, structure, intended readership, and relationship to our other book Getting Started with R. Some of the text in the Preface may come across as a sales pitch (it probably is), but it also aims to make prospective readers clear about what they will find in Insights and why.

The table of contents of Insights as a pdf..

On this Companion Website you will find information additional to that in the book:

  1. An overview of the Insights Workflow.
  2. Questions and exercises to work through with each chapter of the book.
  3. More topics in R.
  4. Additional data analysis concepts.
  5. An additional Workflow Demonstration: polity and food diversity
  6. An additional Workflow Demonstration: effects of dietary diversity on populations
  7. A relatively unguided workflow demonstration effects of dietary restriction on individuals.
  8. An example of how one might complete the previous Workflow Demonstration.
  9. Model scripts for each Workflow Demonstration.
  10. Details of a live data analysis demonstration that can be used in the very first class of an Introduction to Data Analysis undergraduate classes. It is designed to capture the students’ interest.
  11. More datasets that could be developed into new Workflow Demonstrations (perhaps for students to practice with and/or instructors to use).
  12. Some Related reading.
  13. Answers to the questions that accompany each Chapter.
  14. Any corrections to the published edition of the book.