Beyond Spreadsheets with R: A beginner’s guide to R and RStudio

Summary

Beyond Spreadsheets with R shows you how to take raw data and transform it for use in computations, tables, graphs, and more. You’ll build on simple programming techniques like loops and conditionals to create your own custom functions. You’ll come away with a toolkit of strategies for analyzing and visualizing data of all sorts using R and RStudio.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Technology

Spreadsheets are powerful tools for many tasks, but if you need to interpret, interrogate, and present data, they can feel like the wrong tools for the task. That’s when R programming is the way to go. The R programming language provides a comfortable environment to properly handle all types of data. And within the open source RStudio development suite, you have at your fingertips easy-to-use ways to simplify complex manipulations and create reproducible processes for analysis and reporting.

About the Book

With Beyond Spreadsheets with R you’ll learn how to go from raw data to meaningful insights using R and RStudio. Each carefully crafted chapter covers a unique way to wrangle data, from understanding individual values to interacting with complex collections of data, including data you scrape from the web. You’ll build on simple programming techniques like loops and conditionals to create your own custom functions. You’ll come away with a toolkit of strategies for analyzing and visualizing data of all sorts.

What’s inside

• How to start programming with R and RStudio
• Understanding and implementing important R structures and operators
• Installing and working with R packages
• Tidying, refining, and plotting your data

About the Reader

If you’re comfortable writing formulas in Excel, you’re ready for this book.

About the Author

Dr Jonathan Carroll is a data science consultant providing R programming services. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing data and the R language
2. Getting to know R data types
3. Making new data values
4. Understanding the tools you’ll use: Functions
5. Combining data values
6. Selecting data values
7. Doing things with lots of data
8. Doing things conditionally: Control

structures

1. Visualizing data: Plotting
2. Doing more with your data with extensions