October 2011
Intermediate to advanced
126 pages
3h 10m
English
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Chapter 1. Getting Started
This chapter sets the pace for the rest of the book. If you’re in a hurry, feel free to skip to the chapter you need. (The section In a Hurry? has a quick-ref look at the various strategies and where they fit. That should help you pick a starting point.) Just make sure you come back here to understand our choice of vocabulary, how we chose what to cover, and so on.
Why R?
It’s tough to argue with R. Who could dislike a high-quality, cross-platform, open-source statistical software product? It has an interactive console for exploratory work. It can run as a scripting language to repeat a process you’ve captured. It has a lot of statistical calculations built-in so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Did we mention that R is free?
When the base toolset isn’t enough, R users have access to a rich ecosystem of add-on packages and a gaggle of GUIs to make their lives even easier. No wonder R has become a favorite in the age of Big Data.
Since R is perfect, then, we can end this book. Right?
Not quite. It’s precisely the Big Data age that has exposed R’s blemishes.
Why Not R?
These imperfections stem not from defects in the software itself, but from the passage of time: quite simply, R was not built in anticipation of the Big Data revolution.
R was born in 1995. Disk space was expensive, RAM even more so, and this thing called The Internet was just getting its legs. Notions of “large-scale data analysis” and “high-performance computing” were reasonably rare. Outside ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.