One of the morals that I hope came across manifest in the previous chapter is that R is capable of much better performance than many expect. And, outside of calling low-level code and using parallelization, it is very widely agreed that there is no single best approach (taking personal preference and the largely subjective concept of readability out of the equation) to high-performance R than to learn how to properly wield data.table.
Many would be amazed at what previously intractable problems could be solved using this package. Often, problems that the uninitiated are keen to tackle with powerful remote servers, industrial databases, andtrendy tools can be handled quite easily and gracefully by data.table. And, with every update, data.table keeps getting faster and faster.
Before, we jump right into the code, it would behoove us to discuss what the data.table package gives us.