Since this is our first step on the journey to R knowledge, we have to be sure to acquire all the tools and notions we will use on our trip. You are probably already an R enthusiast and would like to discover more about it, but maybe you are not so sure why you should invest time in learning it. Perhaps you lack confidence in defining its points of strength and weakness, and therefore you are not sure it is the right language to bet on. Crucially, you do not actually know where and how to practically begin your journey to R mastery. The good news, is you will not have to wait long to solve all of these issues, since this first chapter is all about them.

In particular, within this chapter we will:

• Look at the history of R to understand where everything came from
• Analyze R's points of strength, understanding why it is a savvy idea to learn this programming language
• Learn how to install the R language on your computer and how to write and run R code
• Gain an understanding of the R language and the foundation notions needed to start writing R scripts
• Understand R's points of weakness and how to work around them

By the end of the chapter, we will have all the weapons needed to face our first real data mining problem.