Chapter 5 Working with Data

“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” – Carly Fiorina, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard

In the previous chapter, we’ve talked about the different types of data that R stores and the different structures that R stores data in. We’ve mostly just made up numbers, character strings, and logical values for illustration. In this chapter, we’ll use R to do interesting things with real data. This is by far the most popular use of the R programming language, and arguably the most fun! You’ll learn how to read data sets into R, do interesting things with them, and save your results.