In this chapter, we covered the basics of using R. At this point, you should have R installed and you should be able to write and execute several basic commands from the command line or from the text editor of your preference. The concepts of classes and objects were also introduced, which are both important for the rest of the topics that you will learn in this book. We are now ready to proceed to more complex data structures and operations used in spatial data analysis.

The next chapter will be devoted to vectors, the basic data structures in R. Then, we will introduce more complex data structures to represent nonspatial data in Chapter 3, Working with Tables, and spatial data in Chapter 4, Working with Rasters, and Chapter 5, Working with Points, Lines, and Polygons.