The R Book, 3rd Edition

3Essentials of the Language

There is an enormous range of things that can do, and one of the hardest parts of learning is finding our way around. Likewise, there is no obvious order in which different people will want to learn the different components of the language. It is probably worth quickly scanning down the following bullet points, which represent the order in which the introductory material is presented, and if you are relatively experienced in statistical computing, you might want to skip directly to the relevant section. Beginners are strongly recommended to work through the material in the order presented because successive sections build upon knowledge gained from previous sections. This chapter is divided into the following sections:

• Calculations
• Naming objects
• Factors
• Logical operations
• Sequences
• Class membership
• Missing values and things that are not numbers
• Vectors and subscripts
• Vectorised functions
• Matrices and arrays
• Sampling
• Loops and repeats
• Lists
• Text, character strings, and pattern matching
• Dates and times
• Environments
• Writing functions
• Structure of objects ...