This is a companion textbook for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's College of Journalism and Mass Communications course called SPMC 350 - Sports Data Analysis and Visualization. The entire course is in R and promotes repeatable methods for data analysis to students who likely have done no programmatic data analysis and have zero experience working with code. The course philosophy, given those realities, is to have lots of small assignments that build on each other step by step. Those small assignments are of little value each, but add up to a substantial portion of the class grade. Students then have to complete two substantial projects throughout the term, combining an analysis notebook, charts, a blog post written for a general audience making a claim and backing it up with data and a verbal presentation in class.
The book is a companion to Sports Data Tutorials which use the LearnR package to create interactive tutorials. The examples in the book are different from the tutorials -- as the tutorials are guided but graded -- thus making the book a useful tool for reinforcement and easy lookup of previous concepts.
The chapters -- and the tutorials -- attempt a sort of meta narrative where each chapter is a skill and each skill leads to the next skill. When the visual chapters start, each chapter represents a shape of the data and what it represents. The last chapters are about preparing charts to be publication ready from ggplot.
This book will evolve as my course does, adding things as I add them.