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

Using rlist to work with nested data structures


In the previous chapter, you learned about both relational databases that store data in tables and non-relational databases that support nested data structures. In R, the most commonly used nested data structure is a list object. All previous sections focus on manipulating tabular data. In this section, let's play with the rlist package I developed, which is designed for manipulating non-tabular data.

The design of rlist is very similar to dplyr. It provides mapping, filtering, selecting, sorting, grouping, and aggregating functionality for list objects. Run the following code to install the rlist package from CRAN:

install.packages("rlist") 

We have the non-tabular version of the product data stored in data/products.json. In this file, each product has a JSON representation as follows:

{ 
    "id": "T01", 
    "name": "SupCar", 
    "type": "toy", 
    "class": "vehicle", 
    "released": true, 
    "stats"...