## TL;DR

R is a statistical computing and graphics language created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman (1993). It is the dominant language in statistics, bioinformatics, and academic research. CRAN hosts 20,000+ packages. Key libraries: ggplot2 (visualization), dplyr (data manipulation), tidyr, caret (ML).

## Core Explanation

Data frames: R's native tabular structure. `dplyr`: `filter()`, `select()`, `mutate()`, `summarise()`, `group_by()` — grammar of data manipulation. `ggplot2`: layered grammar of graphics — `ggplot(data, aes(x,y)) + geom_point()`. R Markdown: executable documents (code + prose). Shiny: interactive web apps in pure R.

## Further Reading

- [R Documentation](https://www.r-project.org/)