January 2010
Beginner
634 pages
19h 50m
English
Content preview from R in a NutshellBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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The R Console
The R console is the most important tool for using R. The R console is a tool that allows you to type commands into R and see how the R system responds. The commands that you type into the console are called expressions. A part of the R system called the interpreter will read the expressions and respond with a result or an error message. Sometimes, you can also enter an expression into R through the menus.
If you’ve used a command line before (for example, the cmd.exe program on Windows) or a language with an interactive interpreter such as LISP, this should look familiar.[2] If not: don’t worry. Command-line interfaces aren’t as scary as they look. R provides a few tools to save you extra typing, to help you find the tools you’re looking for, and to spot common mistakes. Besides, you have a whole reference book on R that will help you figure out how to do what you want.
Personally, I think that a command-line interface is the best way to analyze data. After I finish working on a problem, I want a record of every step that I took. (I want to know how I loaded the data, if I took a random sample, how I took the sample, whether I created any new variables, what parameters I used in my models, etc.) A command-line interface makes it very easy to keep a record of everything I do and then re-create it later if I need to.
When you launch R, you will see a window with the R console. Inside the console, you will see a message like this:
R version 2.9.2 (2009-08-24) Copyright (C) ...
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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.
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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.