Book Image

Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing

Book Image

Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing

Overview of this book

Data is coming at us faster, dirtier, and at an ever increasing rate. The necessity to handle many, complex statistical analysis projects is hitting statisticians and analysts across the globe. This book will show you how to deal with it like never before, thus providing an edge and improving productivity. "Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing" will teach you how to quickly and efficiently create and manage statistical analysis projects, import data, develop R scripts, and generate reports and graphics. R developers will learn about package development, coding principles, and version control with RStudio. This book will help you to learn and understand RStudio features to effectively perform statistical analysis and reporting, code editing, and R development. The book starts with a quick introduction where you will learn to load data, perform simple analysis, plot a graph, and generate automatic reports. You will then be able to explore the available features for effective coding, graphical analysis, R project management, report generation, and even project management. "Learning RStudio for R Statistical Computing" is stuffed with feature-rich and easy-to-understand examples, through step-by-step instructions helping you to quickly master the most popular IDE for R development.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Version control


In the following sections we will discuss what a version control system is, and demonstrate RStudio's version control capabilities.

Introduction to version control

As a project matures, scripts and reports are often adjusted, rewritten, or discarded altogether. These changes are usually improvements, but it's easy to make a mistake and you may wish to revert changes every now and then. Also, you may want to perform some experiments that require large changes in your scripts. Beginner programmers often solve this by making copies of files with special extensions such as .old or .1. After a while, such solutions usually end up in a kludge of files and directories from which it is hard to obtain the correctly running version, especially when working with many people on a single project. Version control systems are a great way to cope with such a development process.

There are many version control systems available, both proprietary and free, but all systems at least allow you to...