Advanced R, Second Edition (eBook)

Advanced R helps you understand how R works at a fundamental level. It is designed for R programmers who want to deepen their understanding of the language, and programmers experienced in other languages who want to understand what makes R different and special. This book will teach you the foundations of R; three fundamental programming paradigms (functional, object-oriented, and metaprogramming); and powerful techniques for debugging and optimisingyour code.By reading this book, you will learn: The difference between an object and its name, and why the distinction is importantThe important vector data structures, how they fit together, and how you can pull them apart using subsetting The fine details of functions and environments The condition system, which powers messages, warnings, and errorsThe powerful functional programming paradigm, which can replace many for loopsThe three most important OO systems: S3, S4, and R6The tidy eval toolkit for metaprogramming, which allows you to manipulate code and control evaluationEffective debugging techniques that you can deploy, regardless of how your code is runHow to find and remove performance bottlenecksThe second edition is a comprehensive update: New foundational chapters: "e;Names and values,"e; "e;Control flow,"e; and "e;Conditions"e; comprehensive coverage of object oriented programming with chapters on S3, S4, R6, and how to choose between themMuch deeper coverage of metaprogramming, including the new tidy evaluation frameworkuse of new package like rlang (http://rlang.r-lib.org), which provides a clean interface to low-level operations, and purr (http://purrr.tidyverse.org/) for functional programmingUse of color in code chunks and figuresHadley Wickham is Chief Scientist at RStudio, an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University and the University of Auckland, and a member of the R Foundation. He is the lead developer of the tidyverse, a collection of R packages, including ggplot2 and dplyr, designed to support data science. He is also the author of R for Data Science (with Garrett Grolemund), R Packages, and ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis.