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

Chapter 10. Object-Oriented Programming

In the previous chapter, you learned how functional programming and metaprogramming make it possible to customize the behavior of functions. We can create a function within a certain context, which is called a closure. We can also use higher order functions by passing functions around just like other objects.

In this chapter, you will learn how to customize the behavior of objects by walking into the world of object-oriented programming. R provides several different object-oriented systems to work with. At first glance, they look quite different from the object-oriented systems in other programming languages. However, the idea is mostly the same. I will briefly explain the concept of class and method of objects, and show you how they can be useful in unifying the way we work with data and models.

We will cover the following topics at the beginner level in the subsequent sections:

  • The idea of object-oriented programming

  • S3 system

  • S4 system

  • Reference class...