If your job involves working with data in any manner, you cannot afford to ignore the R revolution! If your domain is called data analysis, analytics, informatics, data science, reporting, business intelligence, data management, big data, or visualization, you just have to learn R as this programming language is a game-changing sledgehammer.

However, if you have looked at a standard text on R or read some of the online discussions, you might feel that there is a steep learning curve of six months or more to grok the language. I will debunk this myth through my book by focusing on practical essentials instead of theory.

If you have programmed in some language in the past (whether that language be SAS, SPSS, C, C++, C#, Java, Python, Perl, Visual Basic, Ruby, Scala, shell scripts, or plain old SQL), even if you are rusty, this book will get you up and running with R in a single day, writing programs for data analysis and visualization.

At the end of this book you will be able to:

• write R programs to execute on the 3 major data-analysis phases.
• visualize data in an illustrative and interactive manner
• move on to using R for big data analytics

R you excited? You should be. Let us charge forward!