The R Project for Statistical Computing, or simply named R, is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It is also a programming language that is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis.
Although there are other programming languages for handling statistics, R has become one of the most popular languages for statistical routines, offering a package repository with over 6,400 packages. The R language also offers versatile and powerful plotting tools.
In this chapter, you will learn the fundamentals of the R programming language and how it can be applied to GIS analysis. However, this chapter is not a comprehensive guide to the R language. Instead, it will focus on introducing you to some of the most important constructs of the language and the various data types you can expect to encounter. In future chapters, you'll integrate R programming scripts with...