Practical Data Science with R

Chapter 2. Loading data into R

This chapter covers

• Understanding R’s data frame structure
• Loading data into R from files and from relational databases
• Transforming data for analysis

If your experience has been like ours, many of your data science projects start when someone points you toward a bunch of data and you’re left to make sense of it. Your first thought may be to use shell tools or spreadsheets to sort through it, but you quickly realize that you’re taking more time tinkering with the tools than actually analyzing the data. Luckily, there’s a better way. In this chapter, we’ll demonstrate how to quickly load and start working with data using R. Using R to transform data is easy because R’s main data type (the data frame) is ideal ...