Visually Enforced

a blog by Gaston Sanchez


Data Tables Wizardry

Posted on September 01, 2014

In this post I’m sharing the slides of a workshop I had the pleasure to give this summer: Manipulating Data Tables with R. Hopefully, this material will give you a jump-start to improve your data wizardry skills.


Data Summer

This summer has been one of the busiest summers I’ve ever had. Among many other projects and commitments, I had the pleasure to give a workshop about Manipulating Data Tables with R.

It’s hard to know in advance whether people will be engaged when giving a talk, or a course —specially when the participants form a unique audience coming from different fields and with very heterogenous backgrounds. However, I was amazed to see the great enthusiasm and involvement showed by all the participants. At the end, I decided to talk to the workshop organizers about an issue that was left out of the contract: “Would you agree to let me release the slides and make them publicly available?” I was very happy when they gladly accepted my proposal with no strings attached.

I’m also taking advantage of this period of the year when summer vacations are almost over and students are getting ready to go back to school. For those padawans pursuing a career with a heavy analytics component, I’m convinced that these slides will help them build some of the required skills to crunch data in R.


Outline

The material of the slides cover most of the common topics for working with data tables:

As I always tell the audience during my trainings, tutorials and workshops: there are 3 things you should do to become proficient when learning a new skill: 1) practice, 2) practice, and 3) practice.

Other Resources

Keep in mind that these slides are no substitute for checking other resources like the following excellent books:

  • Data Manipulation with R (by Phil Spector)
  • The Art of R Programming (by Norman Matloff)
  • R Cookbook (by Paul Teetor)
  • R in a Nutshell (by Joseph Adler)
  • Advanced R (by Hadley Wickham)

And in French:

  • R L’essentiel (by Joseph Adler)
  • Le Logiciel R (by P. Lafaye, R. Drouilhet, and B. Liquet)

Published in categories resources  Tagged with data