A practical guide to help you learn and understand the programming techniques necessary to exploit the full power of R
This book is designed for people with some experience in basic programming practices. It is also assumed that they have some basic experience using R and are familiar using the command line in an R environment. Our primary goal is to raise a beginner to a more advanced level to make him/her more comfortable creating programs and extending R to solve common problems.
R is best suited to produce data and visual analytics through customizable scripts and commands, instead of typical statistical tools that provide tick boxes and drop-down menus for users. The book is divided into three parts to help you perform these steps. It starts by providing you with an overview of the basic data types, data structures, and tools available in R that are used to solve common tasks. It then moves on to offer insights and examples on object-oriented programming with R; this includes an introduction to the basic control structures available in R with examples. It also includes details on how to implement S3 and S4 classes. Finally, the book provides three detailed examples that demonstrate how to bring all of these ideas together.
Chapter 1. Data Types
Chapter 2. Organizing Data
Chapter 3. Saving Data and Printing Results
Chapter 4. Calculating Probabilities and Random Numbers
Chapter 5. Character and String Operations
Chapter 6. Converting and Defining Time Variables
Chapter 7. Basic Programming
Chapter 8. S3 Classes
Chapter 9. S4 Classes
Chapter 10. Case Study – Course Grades
Chapter 11. Case Study – Simulation