Programming Skills for Data Science: Start Writing Code to Wrangle, Analyze, and Visualize Data with R, First Edition

11Manipulating Data with dplyr

The dplyr¹ (“dee-ply-er”) package is the preeminent tool for data wrangling in R (and perhaps in data science more generally). It provides programmers with an intuitive vocabulary for executing data management and analysis tasks. Learning and using this package will make your data preparation and management process faster and easier to understand. This chapter introduces the philosophy behind the package and provides an overview of how to use the package to work with data frames using its expressive and efficient syntax.

¹dplyr: http://dplyr.tidyverse.org

11.1 A Grammar of Data Manipulation

Hadley Wickham, the original creator of the dplyr package, fittingly refers to it as a Grammar of Data Manipulation. This ...