July 2012
Beginner
408 pages
9h 17m
English
Content preview from R For Dummies
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Chapter 8
Putting the Fun in Functions
In This Chapter
Automating your work with functions
Playing with arguments
Finding objects within the functions
Working with methods
Automating your work is probably the number-one reason why you use a programming language. For that, you can get pretty far with the built-in functions of R in combination with scripts, but scripts aren’t very flexible when dealing with variable input. Luckily, R allows you to write your own custom functions (for example, to automate the cleaning of your data, to apply a series of analyses with one command, or to construct custom plots). In this chapter, you discover how to write and work with functions in R.
Moving from Scripts to Functions
Going from a script to a function doesn’t take much effort at all. A function is essentially a piece of code that is executed consecutively and without interruption. In that way, a function doesn’t differ that much from a script run using the source() function, as we explain in Chapter 2.
But a function has two very nice advantages over scripts:
It can work with variable input, ...
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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.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
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.