Computerworld’s advanced beginner’s guide to R

Many newcomers to R got their start learning the language with Computerworld's Beginner's Guide to R, a 6-part introduction to the basics of the language. Now, budding R users who want to take their skills to the next level have a new guide to help them: Computerword's Advanced Beginner's Guide to R. Written by Sharon Machlis, author of the prior Beginner's guide and regular reporter of R news at Computerworld, this new 72-page guide dives into some trickier topics related to R: extracting data via API, data wrangling, and data visualization. 

On the data wrangling front, the guide provides some recipes for handling messy data. You'll learn how to transform data and add the resulting data as a new column to a data frame. There's also an extended look at restructuring data: transforming "wide" data to "long" data, and vice versa.

For visualizing data, there's a basic intro to the ggplot2 package and its grammar of graphics. There's also an in-depth tutorial on creating choropleths: geographics maps with regions shaded by data values.

And as an in-dept example of importing data, you'll learn how to use the Google Analytics API to download and prepare data on traffic to your website.

Finally, don't miss the comprehensive index of R packages for data import, data wrangling, and visualization.

To download the 72-page PDF (free by providing your email address) visit Computerworld at the link below.

Computerworld Crash Course: Advanced Beginner's Guide to R