The RBioc Book

The RBioc Book is an open-access, executable textbook that teaches introductory R programming, statistics, and Bioconductor to biologists and other researchers coming to data science for the first time. Written as a Quarto book with runnable R code in every chapter, it covers the R language and the RStudio environment, data structures, data wrangling with the tidyverse (dplyr), exploratory data analysis and visualization with ggplot2, statistical inference and hypothesis testing, clustering, and machine learning, alongside a hands-on tour of genomics and bioinformatics workflows in Bioconductor - including SummarizedExperiment, GenomicRanges, gene-expression analysis from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), DNA methylation and epigenetic clocks, ChIP-seq, ATAC-seq, single-cell RNA-seq, and microbiome data. It also includes a primer on common biological assays for readers without a biology background. Designed for self-directed adult learners and usable as a course companion, the book is released into the public domain under CC0.