In Chapter 1, The era of "Big Data", you have become familiar with the most useful Big Data terminology, and a small selection of typical tools applied to unusually large or complex data sets. You have also gained essential insights into how R was developed and how it became the leading statistical computing environment and programming language favored by technology giants and the best universities in the world. In this chapter you will have the opportunity to learn some most important R functions from base R installation and well-known third party packages used for data crunching, transformation, and analysis. More specifically in this chapter you will:
Understand the landscape of available R data structures
Be guided through a number of R operations allowing you to import data from standard and proprietary data formats
Carry out essential data cleaning and processing activities such as subsetting, aggregating, creating...