Faculty at William & Mary make incredible contributions to academia with their research. In this blog series, we interview faculty with recent publications for insight into their scholarship. Dr. Lawrence Lemis, a mathematics professor, discusses his new book the second edition of Learning Base R.
In 2-3 sentences, describe your scholarship to someone unfamiliar with the field:
R is an open-source programming language that has become the software tool of choice in statistics and data science. Learning Base R provides an introduction to the R language for those with or without prior programming experience. It introduces key topics needed to begin analyzing data and programming in R.
What was the most exciting/interesting part of this project for you?
R has flexible data structures for organizing and storing data, graphical tools for generating statistical graphics, and sophisticated data analysis procedures for statistical inference. It is difficult to get a comprehensive introduction to R via various internet sites, and this book provides an introduction to R in which each chapter builds on the material in previous chapters.
Who might be interested in reading this book?
The book is appropriate for anyone who is interested in learning the base version of R. The focus of the book is on the base R language and does not emphasize one application or methodology.