Learning R for Geospatial Analysis

Exploring the basic object types in R

So far, we have encountered two types of objects in R: numeric values (numeric vectors, to be precise, as we will see in Chapter 2, Working with Vectors and Time Series) and functions. In this section, we are going to introduce the key concept that an object is an instance of a certain class. Then, we will distinguish between, for operational purposes, the classes that are used to store data (data structures) and classes that are used to perform operations (functions). Finally, a short sample code that performs a simple GIS operation in R will be presented to demonstrate the way themes introduced in this chapter (and those that will be introduced in Chapter 2, Working with Vectors and Time Series, and Chapter ...