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 object functions


In the previous chapter, you learned about some functions that work with the environment and packages. In this section, we will get to know some basic functions that deal with objects in general. More specifically, I will introduce you to more functions to access the type and dimensions of a data object. You will get an impression of how these concepts can be combined and how they work together.

Testing object types

Although everything in R is an object, objects have different types.

Suppose the object we are dealing with is user-defined. We will create a function that behaves in different ways according to the type of the input object. For example, we need to create a function named take_it that returns the first element if the input object as an atomic vector (for example, numeric vector, character vector, or logical vector), but returns a user-defined element if the input object is a list of data and index.

For example, if the input is a numeric vector such as c(1,...