Preface

In a world where data is becoming increasingly important, data analysts, scientists, and business people need tools to analyze and process large volumes of data efficiently. This book is my attempt to pass on what I've learned so far, so that you can quickly become an effective and efficient R programmer. Reading it will help you understand how to use R to solve complex problems, avoid some of the mistakes I've made, and teach you useful techniques that can be helpful in a variety of contexts. In the process, I hope to show you that, despite its uncommon aspects, R is an elegant and powerful language, and is well suited for data analysis and statistics, as well as complex systems.

After reading this book, you will be familiar with R's fundamentals, as well as some of its advanced features. You will understand data structures, and you will know how to efficiently deal with them. You will also understand how to design complex systems that perform efficiently, and how to make these systems usable by other people through web applications. At a lower level, you will understand how to work with object-oriented programming, functional programming, and reactive programming, and what code may be better written in each of these paradigms. You will learn how to use various cutting edge tools that R provides to develop software, how to identify performance bottlenecks, and how to fix them, possibly using other programming languages such as Fortran and C++. Finally, you will be comfortable reading and understanding the majority of R code, as well as provide feedback for others' code.