Book Image

Data Smart

By : John W. Foreman
Book Image

Data Smart

By: John W. Foreman

Overview of this book

Data Science gets thrown around in the press like it's magic. Major retailers are predicting everything from when their customers are pregnant to when they want a new pair of Chuck Taylors. It's a brave new world where seemingly meaningless data can be transformed into valuable insight to drive smart business decisions. But how does one exactly do data science? Do you have to hire one of these priests of the dark arts, the "data scientist," to extract this gold from your data? Nope. Data science is little more than using straight-forward steps to process raw data into actionable insight. And in Data Smart, author and data scientist John Foreman will show you how that's done within the familiar environment of a spreadsheet. Why a spreadsheet? It's comfortable! You get to look at the data every step of the way, building confidence as you learn the tricks of the trade. Plus, spreadsheets are a vendor-neutral place to learn data science without the hype. But don't let the Excel sheets fool you. This is a book for those serious about learning the analytic techniques, math and the magic, behind big data.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Cover
2
Credits
3
About the Author
4
About the Technical Editors
5
Acknowledgments
18
End User License Agreement

Getting Up and Running with R

You can download R from the R website at www.r-project.org. Just click the download link, pick a mirror nearest you, and download the installer for your OS.

Run through the installer (on Windows it's nice to install the software as the administrator) and then open the application. On Windows and Mac, the R console is going to load. It looks something like Figure 10.1.

image

Figure 10.1 The R console on Mac OS

Inside the R console, you type commands into the > prompt and press Return to get the system to do anything. Here's a couple for you:

> print("No regrets. Texas forever.")
[1] "No regrets. Texas forever."
> 355/113
[1] 3.141593

You can call the print function to get the system to print out text. You can also type in arithmetic directly to make calculations. Now, my standard workflow for using R is:

  1. 1. Bring data into an R.
  2. 2. Do data-sciency things with data.
  3. 3. Dump results out of R where some other person or process...