Summary
Contents
Focusing on developing practical R skills rather than teaching pure statistics, Dr. Kurt Taylor Gaubatz's A Survivor's Guide to R provides a gentle yet thorough introduction to R. The book is structured around critical R tasks, and focuses on applied knowledge, rather than abstract concepts. Gaubatz's easy-to-read approach helps students with little or no background in statistics or programming to develop real-world R skills through straightforward coverage of R objects and functions. Focusing on real-world data, the challenges of dataset construction, and the use of R's powerful graphing tools, the guide is written in an accessible, sympathetic, even humorous style that ensures students acquire functional R skills they can use in their own projects and carry into their work beyond the classroom.
Transforming Data
Transforming Data
It is now time to come to grips with the unfortunate but unavoidable fact that the world does not actually revolve around you, an important life lesson that R will frequently reinforce. Unlike the warm and comforting world of a statistics class, real-world data rarely come to you prepackaged in the form in which you need them. You will have to transform and reshape your data in various ways to make them functional for your purposes. That is the subject of the next five chapters.
Consider, for example, a situation where you need to pull together data from different sources. One data set might be monthly, while the other is daily. One might use metric measurements, ...
