 Hi, I'm John Little, and you're watching the Introduction to R Instruction series. This series is part of the R Fund Learning Resources website, which is sponsored by the Center for Data and Visualization Sciences at Duke University Libraries. In this brief section, we're going to talk about two things that I get asked about a lot in introductory sessions, assignments and pipes. Let's take them one at a time. An assignment is simply a way to fix the value of a function to an object name, all right? An assignment operator looks just like this. It's a less than symbol followed by a dash. In order to create that, you just type alt dash on your keyboard. You can think of that as saying gets value from, and here's an example. If I have the function five times five, for which the answer is 25, and I want that answer to be something I can reference later, I can assign that value of that function to a word called answer. So answer gets value from five times five. Let's have a quick look in our studio. So just in the console, I can type answer, alt dash, answer gets value from five times five. And then if I want to look at that, what is the value of answer? I can just type answer, and of course it's 25. Similarly, the question that I get a lot is what is a pipe? Well, a pipe is a way to chain together multiple functions into a longer sentence, if you will, and therefore the pipe becomes a conjunction. You can think of it as saying, and then, you can make the pipe appear on your keyboard by typing control shift M, if you're on Windows machine, or command shift M if you're on a Mac. So in this case, we would read this as answer, and then take the square root. Let's have a look. All right. First of all, the pipe actually comes from a package called McGridder, but it's also available in the tidyverse. So the easiest way to get this to be possible to use this function is to make sure you have run the tidyverse libraries, make sure you've loaded those libraries. So remember, I still have an object called answer, it has a value of 25, and if I type answer, and then take the square root of that, the answer is five. If I wanted to keep that answer around, I would have to assign it. To gets value from answer, and then take the square root, which remember, when you assign it to an object name, you don't automatically get to see the value. If you need to see the value of the object name, just type answer to.