Preface

The primary purpose of this textbook is to provide students with a foundation in both languages, enabling them to understand core programming concepts and the basic syntax of Python and R. Integrated development environments will be Spyder for Python and RStudio for R. Students will be equipped with the essential skills to further their learning and tackle more advanced topics in either language. The specific learning outcomes are as follows:

• Understand fundamental programming concepts such as variables, data types, operators, and control structures in both Python and R.
• Learn the basic syntax of Python and R.
• Explore fundamental data structures like lists, arrays, vectors, data frames and matrices in both languages.
• Learn how to read data from various sources such as CSV files and databases.
• Understand how to write (save) data to different formats.
• Explore data manipulation techniques including filtering, sorting, merging, and reshaping data.
• Learn how to perform basic statistical analysis and summary statistics on data sets.
• Learn how to create visualizations such as scatter plots, bar plots, histograms, and line plots.
• Understand best practices for writing clean, efficient, and maintainable code in Python and R.
• Learn how to use R with Generative AI