Course Objectives

• To become literate in stat programming (R and/or SAS).
• To learn to effectively communicate through the visual presentation of data.
• To understand and imitate good programming practices.

Texts:

1. The Art of R Programming: A Tour of Statistical Software Design by N Matloff, No Starch Press.
   This book is much more than an R intro (there are many free intros available), as it contains good discussions of stat computing in general. I strongly recommend that you buy it.
2. An Introduction to R by the R Core Team, 2012. Note: this is a free web document. It comes with R when you load it on any computer. Within R, type help.start() (or click on the help button), and then on "Introduction to R". Or you can grab it from the Cran website. We will start with the "Sample Session" in Appendix A.
3. Documentation at RStudio.org. We will be using RStudio as an interface to R. It does a nice job of organizing the multiple windows we need. Documentation is free.
4. For the last 5 weeks:
   The Little SAS Book: A Primer by Dewiche and Slaughter, SAS Press.

Reference Books on Data Visualization (not required)

• The Elements of Graphing Data William Cleveland
• Visualizing Data William Cleveland
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information Edward Tufte
• R Graphics Paul Murrell, 2006, Chapman-Hall

Topics:

1. First 5 weeks: R Intro
   Data input, merging, and cleaning. Plots: scatterplots, histograms, bar charts, mosaic plots, adding elements to plots (legend, title, text, lines, smoothers), controlling plot parameters. Principles of graphical presentation of data.
2. Second five weeks: More advanced R
   Multiple plots per page using lattice and ggplot2. More on data and project management. Building functions. Logical constructs. Object orientation.
3. Third five weeks: SAS Intro. We'll cover the same topics mentioned above now with SAS.

Assessment:

• Weekly homeworks are worth one-half of the grade. Homework average will be penalized for poor attendance and or repeated tardiness. Discussing problems with others is fine, but you must understand everything you write down and turn in, and you each have to go through the struggle of learning the software programs. Late homework will be devalued by 10% times the number of days it's late.
• Exams will be given over each third of the course as indicated on the main course page. These will count as the other one-half of the grade. The second exam will cover the first two-thirds of the course, the third exam covers only the SAS portion.
• In the second third of the course, I plan to assign a project. More info on points later, but it may count as much as 1/3 of the grade, making exams and weekly homeworks worth a third each.