Let's start by importing some data into R. Because R is what is called an object-oriented programming language, we'll always take our information and give it a home inside a named object. There are many different kinds of objects, which you can specify, but usually R will assign a type that seems to fit best.
[If you'd like to explore this all in a bit more depth, you can find a very helpful summary in R for Data Science, chapter 8, ["data import"](https://r4ds.hadley.nz/data-import#reading-data-from-a-file).]{.aside}
In the example below, we're going to read in data from a comma separated value file ("csv") which has rows of information on separate lines in a text file with each column separated by a comma. This is one of the standard plain text file formats. R has a function you can use to import this efficiently called "read.csv". Each line of code in R usually starts with the object, and then follows with instructions on what we're going to put inside it, where that comes from, and how to format it:
You can see how I've nested the previous command inside the `kable` command. For reference, in some cases when you're working with really complex scripts with many different libraries and functions, they may end up with functions that have the same name. You can specify the library where the function is meant to come from by preceding it with :: as we've done `knitr::` above. The same kind of output can be gotten using `tail`:
The first thing you're going to want to do is to take a smaller subset of a large data set, either by filtering out certain columns or rows. Now let's say we want to just work with the data from the West Midlands, and we'd like to omit some of the columns. We can choose a specific range of columns using `select`, like this:
You can use the `filter` command to do this. To give an example, `filter` can pick a single row in the following way:
[Some readers will want to pause here and check out Hadley Wickham's "R For Data Science" book, in the section, ["Data visualisation"](https://r4ds.hadley.nz/data-visualize#introduction) to get a fuller explanation of how to explore your data.]{.aside}
There are two basic ways to do visualisations in R. You can work with basic functions in R, often called "base R" or you can work with an alternative library called ggplot: