Practical Data Science with R, Second Edition

2 Starting with R and data

This chapter covers

• Starting to work with R and data
• Mastering R’s data frame structure
• Loading data into R
• Recoding data for later analysis

This chapter works through how to start working with R and how to import data into R from diverse sources. This will prepare you to work examples throughout the rest of the book.

Figure 2.1 is a diagram representing a mental model for the book that has been reshaded to emphasize the purpose of this chapter: starting to work with R and importing data into R. The overall diagram shows the data science process diagram from chapter 1 combined with a rebus form of the book title. In each chapter, we will reshade this mental model to indicate the parts of the data science process we ...