Advanced R

An Essential Reference for Intermediate and Advanced R Programmers

Advanced R presents useful tools and techniques for attacking many types of R programming problems, helping you avoid mistakes and dead ends. With more than ten years of experience programming in R, the author illustrates the elegance, beauty, and flexibility at the heart of R.

The book develops the necessary skills to produce quality code that can be used in a variety of circumstances. You will learn:

• The fundamentals of R, including standard data types and functions
• Functional programming as a useful framework for solving wide classes of problems
• The positives and negatives of metaprogramming
• How to write fast, memory-efficient code

This book not only helps current R users become R programmers but also shows existing programmers what’s special about R. Intermediate R programmers can dive deeper into R and learn new strategies for solving diverse problems while programmers from other languages can learn the details of R and understand why R works the way it does.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Introduction

Part I – Foundations
Chapter 2 – Data structures
Chapter 3 – Subsetting
Chapter 4 – Vocabulary
Chapter 5 – Style guide
Chapter 6 – Functions
Chapter 7 – OO field guide
Chapter 8 – Environments
Chapter 9 – Debugging, condition handling, and defensive programming

Part II – Functional programming
Chapter 10 – Functional programming
Chapter 11 – Functionals
Chapter 12 – Function operators

Part III – Computing on the language
Chapter 13 – Non-standard evaluation
Chapter 14 – Expressions
Chapter 15 – Domain specific languages

Part IV – Performance
Chapter 16 – Performance
Chapter 17 – Optimising code
Chapter 18 – Memory
Chapter 19 – High performance functions with Rcpp
Chapter 20 – R’s C interface