Hopefully you will get a sense of some of the power of R this semester. R is becoming the primary language of statistics and is being adopted across academia, government, and businesses to help manage and learn from the growing volume of data being obtained. This means that the skills you learn now can follow you the rest of your life. They are open source and free to download and use (and will always be that way). You will need to download the statistical software package called R and an enhanced interface to R called R-studio (Rstudio, 2014).
This book and access to a computer (PC, Mac, or just computer lab computers on campus) are the only required materials for the course.