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

R's working directory


An R session always starts in a directory, no matter whether it is launched as an R terminal or in RStudio. The directory in which R is running is called the working directory of the R session. When you access other files on your hard drive, you can use either absolute paths (for example, D:\Workspaces\test-project\data\2015.csv) in most cases or relative paths (for example, data\2015.csv) with the right working directory (in this case, D:\Workspaces\test-project).

The use of relative paths to the working directory does not change the file paths, but the way you specify them is shorter. It also makes your scripts more portable. Imagine you are writing some R scripts to produce graphics according to a bunch of data files in a directory. If you write the directory as an absolute path, then anyone else who wants to run your script on their own computer would have to modify the paths in your code to the location of the data in their hard drives. However, if you write the...