Abdoul Blog - Base R Essentials

Well, what motivates me to write this series of blog posts is a tweet I saw a few weeks ago, before I went to bed, about what makes an R Developer.

Yes I usually take a daily drop of news from the bird site before to fall into the arms of Morpheus.

Good morning.

If the only things you’ve ever done with R rely on the “tidyverse,” you don’t know R, and can’t claim to.

Be sure your students know this.
— Chris "Institutions Have Consequences" Zorn ((prisonrodeo?)) January 9, 2023

Guess I don’t need to paint you all the comments that this tweet has sparked between people who agree with this view and those who think that it is a dumb claim especially coming from an educator.

Before I share my stance on this with you, I have tried from that moment, as a tidyverse aficionado, to summarize all the base R features that I use daily or have used in the past, which I still feel useful in the ecosystem of tidyverse packages.

I have drawn greatly by a cheat sheet written in french by Mayeul KAUFMANN, however I added a bench of base R functions, operators and tricks I encountered while improving my R skills.

This first post is about HELP and OBJECTS DECLARATION and how to access them using R console and specific functions.

Functions	Tasks / Examples
`help(topic)`	documentation about `topic`
`?topic`	also documentation about `topic`
`help.search("topic")`	searches in help for documentation matching `topic`
`apropos("use.tidy.")`	all objects names corresponding to regular expression `use.tidy.`
`help.start()`	HTML version of the help
`example(function)`	runs the example given for the function at bottom of help page. Ex: `example("cut")`
`<-, ->`	arrows for expressions assignations. And yes, arrows can be considered as functions. The variables assignation is done in the arrow direction. Ex: `a <- 2 b <- a b -> c -> d`
`str(a)`	object structure Ex: `str(a)` where a is an object
`summary(a)`	statistical summary of an object, the results vary according to the argument object class. For a characters string, it returns the length, the class and the mode. For a numeric array it return the min,the max, the 1st quarter, the median, the 3rd quarter … etc.
`ls()`	lists all objects defined in the environment
`rm(x)`	removes the objects named by character vector `x`
`ls.str()`	lists all objects defined in the environment and for each object, it returns its structure
`dir()`	lists the files in current *dir*ectory
`methods(class=class(a))`	lists all methods to deal with objects of the class of object `a`
`library(x)`	loads package `x`
`library(help=x)`	lists available datasets and functions in package `x`. Ex: `library(help="ggplot2")`
`attach(x)`	adds the content of `x` in R search list. So you can find it with `search()` function. `x` can be a list, a data frame or an R data file.
`detach(x)`	does the opposite. It removes the content of x from the search list.
`q()`	close R. I don’t think you will quit your session often with that but it is useful to know that you can do it that way.

This list is exhaustive but it is a good start. I will add to it as I learn more. Now let’s move on to part 2 on writing/reading from a file.

Citation

BibTeX citation:

@online{issabida2023,
  author = {Abdoul ISSA BIDA},
  title = {Base {R} {Essentials} - {Part} {I}},
  date = {2023-02-11},
  url = {https://www.abdoulblog.com},
  langid = {en}
}

For attribution, please cite this work as:

Abdoul ISSA BIDA. 2023. “Base R Essentials - Part I.” February 11, 2023. https://www.abdoulblog.com.