What you’ll learn—and how you can apply it You’ll learn to perform efficient data carpentry—the process of taking rough, raw, and to some extent randomly arranged input data and creating neatly organized and tidy data. Working with clean data will be beneficial for every subsequent stage of your R project. In this Lesson, readers will learn how to create user-friendly data frames with tibble, reshape data with tidyr operations such as gather and separate, process data efficiently with dplyr’s functions, and connect R to a range of database types. This lesson is for you because You are working on a project in R and have reached the data processing stage. You want to clean, manipulate, and tidy your dataset to get it ready for the next stage (typically modeling and visualization). Prerequisites Some knowledge of R Materials or downloads needed in advance Installed RStudio This Lesson relies on a number of packages for data cleaning and processing. Check that they are installed on your computer and load them with: library("tibble") library("tidyr") library("stringr") library("readr") library("dplyr") library("data.table") RSQLite and ggmap are also used in a couple of examples, though they are not central to the Lesson’s content.

What you’ll learn—and how you can apply it You’ll learn how to optimize your tried and tested code. In this Lesson, learners will understand how to profile code to identify and prevent key bottlenecks in R performance, as well as tricks that may improve performance on row and column operations and matrices. This Lesson also presents an example of specific improvements that can be made to enhance performance of the movie_square() function. This lesson is for you because You already have well-developed code that is mature conceptually and has been tried and tested. Now, you want to optimize this code. Prerequisites: Some knowledge of R and have well-developed R code Materials or downloads needed: Installed RStudio Some examples in this Lesson require a working C++ compiler

There are many excellent R resources for visualization, data science, and package development. Hundreds of scattered vignettes, web pages, and forums explain how to use R in particular domains. But little has been written on how to simply make R work effectively—until now. This hands-on book teaches novices and experienced R users how to write efficient R code. Drawing on years of experience teaching R courses, authors Colin Gillespie and Robin Lovelace provide practical advice on a range of topics—from optimizing the set-up of RStudio to leveraging C++—that make this book a useful addition to any R user’s bookshelf.