R in Action

Data analysis and graphics with R - SECOND EDITION

ROBERT I. KABACOFF

ISBN: 9781617291388

## An "object" is basically anything that can be assigned a value. 
   For R, that is just about "everything" (data, functions, graphs, analytic
   results, and more). Every object has a class
 
 attribute telling R how to handle it.

Once you’ve had a chance to try out R’s graphics capabilities, it’s time to get back to the business of analyzing data. Data rarely comes in a readily usable format. Significant time must often be spent combining data from different sources, cleaning messy data (miscoded data, mismatched data, missing data), and creating new variables (combined variables, transformed variables, recoded variables) before the questions of interest can be addressed.

Today’s data analysts need to access data from a wide range of sources (database management systems, text files, statistical packages, and spreadsheets), merge the pieces of data together, clean and annotate them, analyze them with the latest methods, present the findings in meaningful and graphically appealing ways, and incorporate the results into attractive reports that can be distributed to stakeholders and the public. As you’ll see in the following pages, R is a comprehensive software package that’s ideally suited to accomplish these goals.