Book Image

Learning R Programming

By : Kun Ren
Book Image

Learning R Programming

By: Kun Ren

Overview of this book

R is a high-level functional language and one of the must-know tools for data science and statistics. Powerful but complex, R can be challenging for beginners and those unfamiliar with its unique behaviors. Learning R Programming is the solution - an easy and practical way to learn R and develop a broad and consistent understanding of the language. Through hands-on examples you'll discover powerful R tools, and R best practices that will give you a deeper understanding of working with data. You'll get to grips with R's data structures and data processing techniques, as well as the most popular R packages to boost your productivity from the offset. Start with the basics of R, then dive deep into the programming techniques and paradigms to make your R code excel. Advance quickly to a deeper understanding of R's behavior as you learn common tasks including data analysis, databases, web scraping, high performance computing, and writing documents. By the end of the book, you'll be a confident R programmer adept at solving problems with the right techniques.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Learning R Programming
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Assignment expressions


Assignment may be one of the most fundamental expressions in all programming languages. What it does is assign or bind a value to a symbol so that we can refer to the value by that symbol later.

Despite the similarity, R adopts the <- operator to perform assignment. This is a bit different from many other languages using = although this is also allowed in R:

x <- 1 
y <- c(1, 2, 3) 
z <- list(x, y) 

We don't have to declare the symbol and its type before assigning a value to it. If a symbol does not exist in the environment, the assignment will create that symbol. If a symbol already exists, the assignment will not end up in conflict, but will rebind the new value to that symbol.

Alternative assignment operators

There are some alternate yet equivalent operators we can use. Compared to x <- f(z), which binds the value of f(z) to symbol x, we can also use -> to perform assignment in the opposite direction:

2 -> x1 

We can even chain...