# 4.13: Summary


This chapter continued where Chapter 3 left off. The focus was still primarily on introducing basic R concepts, but this time at least you can see how those concepts are related to data analysis:

• Installing, loading and updating packages. Knowing how to extend the functionality of R by installing and using packages is critical to becoming an effective R user (Section 4.2)
• Getting around. Section 4.3 talked about how to manage your workspace and how to keep it tidy. Similarly, Section 4.4 talked about how to get R to interact with the rest of the file system.
• Loading and saving data. Finally, we encountered actual data files. Loading and saving data is obviously a crucial skill, one we discussed in Section 4.5.
• Useful things to know about variables. In particular, we talked about special values, element names and classes (Section 4.6).
• More complex types of variables. R has a number of important variable types that will be useful when analysing real data. I talked about factors in Section 4.7, data frames in Section 4.8, lists in Section 4.9 and formulas in Section 4.10.
• Generic functions. How is it that some function seem to be able to do lots of different things? Section 4.11 tells you how.
• Getting help. Assuming that you’re not looking for counselling, Section 4.12 covers several possibilities. If you are looking for counselling, well, this book really can’t help you there. Sorry.

This page titled 4.13: Summary is shared under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Danielle Navarro via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.