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.