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

Summary


In this chapter, you learned about the idea and usage of functional programming, including closures and higher order functions. We went further by digging into the metaprogramming facilities, including language objects, evaluation functions, formula, and the implementation of dynamic scoping to ensure user-input expressions are correctly handled when we customize the evaluation behavior. Since a number of popular packages use metaprogramming and non-standard evaluation to make interactive analysis easier, it is important to understand how it works so that we can be more confident to predict and debug the code.

In the next chapter, we will walk into another infrastructure of R: the object-oriented programming systems. You will learn the basic idea of object-oriented programming, how this idea is implemented in R, and how it can be useful. More specifically, we will begin with the looser S3 system, cover the stricter system S4 which offers a richer set of features, and introduce the...