The first part of this chapter described some important historical events that have led to the development of data analysis: ancient commercial record keeping, royal compilations of land and property, and accurate mathematical models in astronomy, physics, and navigation. It was this activity that led Babbage to invent the computer. Data analysis was borne from necessity in the advance of civilization, from the identification of the source of cholera, to the management of economic data, and the modern processing of massive datasets.
This chapter also briefly explained our choice of the Java programming language for the implementation of the data analysis algorithms to be studied in this book. And finally, it introduced the NetBeans IDE, which we will also use throughout the book.