R is an open-source free programming language for statistical computing, data analysis, and graphics. R is used by a growing number of managers and data analysts inside corporations and academia. R has also found followers among statisticians, engineers, and scientists without computer programming skills who find it easy to use. Its popularity is due to the increasing use of data mining for various goals such as setting ad prices, finding new drugs more quickly or fine-tuning financial models. R has a wide variety of packages for data mining. It’s a language that many non-programmers can easily work with, naturally extending a skill set that is common to high-end Excel users. It’s the perfect tool for when the analyst has a statistical, numerical, or probabilities-based problem based on real data and they’ve pushed Excel past its limits.

Introduction to R Programming is a hands-on course that covers the manipulation of objects in R including reading data, accessing R packages, writing R functions, and making informative graphs. It includes analyzing data using common statistical models. The course teaches how to use the R software (http://www.r-project.org) both on a command line and in a graphical user interface (GUI).