Today, I want to talk briefly about my goals for this series. I also want to be very clear about what I am not going to do here. Behind the scenes, I am developing a realistic, but fake dataset for us to play with in the coming weeks.

This series, "An Introduction to R" will take you through the basic steps used by pollsters all over the country when they receive polling data. These steps include importing the data, building crosstabs (weighted and unweighted), and running some basic statistical tests. Later in the series, I will show you how to format the data for printing.

This is not going to be a comprehensive review of R. For starters, several already exist:

• SimpleR
• An Introduction to R

I have read both of these texts and they are terrific. If you are following this series and want to get the most out of it, you will want to read these texts. I will make sure that I refer to relevant chapters where appropriate. At the beginning of my future posts I will also highlight the commands you will need to master in order to complete the exercises. I will also provide you with example data sets and code to help you complete the exercises, but I will not review each and every command. To do so would be A) repetitive/tedious (see above) and B) Boring as #$^%$. I would rather use our time together focusing on the problems unique to working with the kinds of data commonly found in the social sciences.

Until next time

--pluribus