Normal Distribution Functions in R

I always need to look up how to use the distributional functions in R. Rather than it always being a guessing game I made a quick primer with visual example plots of what each command means and the results each command actually returns.

The below examples assume a N(0,1). A link to the R manual is here.

dnorm-returns the height of the normal curve at a specified value along the x-axis

pnorm-the cumulative density function (CDF) that returns the area to the left of a specified value

qnorm-returns quantiles or "critical values"

rnorm-generates random numbers from the normal distribution

These are examples for the normal distribution, but as you could imagine R has commands for numerous other distributions such as the chi-square, beta, uniform, and poisson.

If you are curious, here are the commands I used to plot these figures: