4: Additional R Concepts

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Form follows function

– Louis Sullivan

In Chapter 3 our main goal was to get started in R. As we go through the book we’ll run into a lot of new R concepts, which I’ll explain alongside the relevant data analysis concepts. However, there’s still quite a few things that I need to talk about now, otherwise we’ll run into problems when we start trying to work with data and do statistics. So that’s the goal in this chapter: to build on the introductory content from the last chapter, to get you to the point that we can start using R for statistics. Broadly speaking, the chapter comes in two parts. The first half of the chapter is devoted to the “mechanics” of R: installing and loading packages, managing the workspace, navigating the file system, and loading and saving data. In the second half, I’ll talk more about what kinds of variables exist in R, and introduce three new kinds of variables: factors, data frames and formulas. I’ll finish up by talking a little bit about the help documentation in R as well as some other avenues for finding assistance. In general, I’m not trying to be comprehensive in this chapter, I’m trying to make sure that you’ve got the basic foundations needed to tackle the content that comes later in the book. However, a lot of the topics are revisited in more detail later, especially in Chapters 7 and 8.