Now that you have installed R and your chosen R development environment, it is time to try them out, acquiring some foundations of the R language. Here, we are going to cover the main building blocks we will use along our journey to build and apply the data mining algorithms this book is all about. More specifically, after warming up a bit by performing basic operations on the interactive console and saving our first R script, we are going to learn how to create and handle:

• Vectors, which are ordered sequences of values, or even just one value 
• Lists, which are defined as a collection of vectors and of every other type of object available in R
• Dataframes, which can be seen as lists composed by vectors, all with the same number of values
• Functions, which are a set of instructions performed by the language that can be applied to vectors, lists, and data frames to manipulate them and gain new information from them:

Finally, we will look at how to define custom functions and how to install additional packages to extend R language functionalities. If you feel overwhelmed by this list of unknown entities, I would like to assure you that we are going to get really familiar with all of them within a few pages.