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,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.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.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.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.
High-Performance R Binaries
On some platforms (like Mac OS X), R is compiled with high-quality math libraries. However, the default libraries on other platforms (like Windows) can be sluggish. If you’re working with large data sets or complicated mathematical operations, you might find it worthwhile to build an optimized version of R with better math libraries.
Revolution R
Revolution Computing is a software company that makes a high-performance version of R. It offers both free and commercial versions, including a 64-bit build of R for Windows. For the latest version, check out its website: http://www.revolution-computing.com/.
Revolution R looks a lot like the standard R binaries (although a little outdated; at the time I was writing this book, Revolution was shipping Revolution R 1.3.0 included R 2.7.2, while the current version from CRAN was 2.10.0). The key difference is the addition of improved math libraries. These are multithreaded and can take advantage of multiple cores when available. There are two helper functions included with Revolution R that can help you set and check the number of cores in use. To check the number of cores, use:
getMKLthreads()
Revolution R guesses the number of threads to use, but you can change the number yourself if it guesses wrong (or if you want to experiment). To set the number of cores explicitly, use:
setMKLthreads(n)
The help file suggests not setting the number of threads higher than the number of available cores.
Building Your Own
Building your ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
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.