R Programming By Example

Putting it all together into high-quality code

Now that we have the fundamentals about analyzing data with descriptive statistics, we're going to improve our code's structure and flexibility by breaking it up into functions. Even though this is common knowledge among efficient programmers, it's not a common practice among data analysts. Many data analysts would simply paste the code we have developed all together, as-is, into a single file, and run it every time they wanted to perform the analysis. We won't be adding new features to the analysis. All we'll do is reorder code into functions to encapsulate their inner-workings and communicate intention with function names (this substantially reduces the need for comments).

We'll focus on producing ...