An essential library of basic commands you can copy and paste into R

The powerful and open-source statistical programming language R is rapidly growing in popularity, but it requires that you type in commands at the keyboard rather than use a mouse, so you have to learn the language of R. But there is a shortcut, and that's where this unique book comes in. A companion book to Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics, this practical reference is a library of basic R commands that you can copy and paste into R to perform many types of statistical analyses.

Whether you're in technology, science, medicine, business, or engineering, you can quickly turn to your topic in this handy book and find the commands you need.

• Comprehensive command reference for the R programming language and a companion book to Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics


• Combines elements of a dictionary, glossary, and thesaurus for the R language


• Provides easy accessibility to the commands you need, by topic, which you can cut and paste into R as needed


• Covers getting, saving, examining, and manipulating data; statistical test and math; and all the things you can do with graphs


• Also includes a collection of utilities that you'll find useful

Simplify the complex statistical R programming language with The Essential R Reference.

Dr. Mark Gardener is an ecologist, lecturer, and writer who discovered R while doing data analysis for his doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology. He conducts courses in R, ecology, and data analysis for a variety of organizations. Mark is also the author of Beginning R: The Statistical Programming Language, a Wrox book published by Wiley.

Introduction xv

Theme 1: Data 1

Data Types 3

Types of Data 3

Altering Data Types 16

Testing Data Types 18

Creating Data 22

Creating Data from the Keyboard 22

Creating Data from the Clipboard 29

Adding to Existing Data 29

Importing Data 39

Importing Data from Text Files 39

Importing Data from Data Files 46

Saving Data 49

Saving Data as a Text File to Disk 50

Saving Data as a Data File to Disk 59

Viewing Data 61

Listing Data 61

Data Object Properties 74

Selecting and Sampling Data 107

Sorting and Rearranging Data 117

Summarizing Data 121

Summary Statistics 121

Summary Tables 136

Distribution of Data 146

Density Functions 148

Probability Functions 152

Quantile Functions 158

Random Numbers 161

Theme 2: Math and Statistics 167

Mathematical Operations 169

Math 169

Logic 188

Complex Numbers .194

Trigonometry 202

Hyperbolic Functions 206

Matrix Math 206

Summary Statistics 223

Simple Summary Stats 223

Tests of Distribution 235

Differences Tests 240

Parametric Tests 241

Non-parametric 252

Correlations and Associations 267

Correlation 267

Association and Goodness of Fit 275

Analysis of Variance and Linear Modeling 283

ANOVA 284

Linear Modeling 300

Miscellaneous Methods 317

Clustering 318

Ordination 324

Time Series 331

Non-linear Modeling and Optimization 333

Theme 3: Graphics 347

Making Graphs 348

Types of Graphs 349

Saving Graphs 389

Adding to Graphs 398

Adding Data 398

Adding Lines 404

Adding Shapes 416

Adding Text 422

Adding Legends 432

Graphical Parameters 436

Using the par Command 437

Altering Color 439

Altering Axis Parameters 446

Altering Text Parameters 453

Altering Line (and Box) Parameters 456

Altering Plot Margins 459

Altering the Graph Window 462

Theme 4: Utilities 475

Install 476

Installing R 477

Installing Packages 477

Using R 480

Using the Program 480

Additional Packages 486

Programming 490

Managing Functions 491

Saving and Running Scripts 498

Conditional Control 502

Returning Results 507

Error Trapping 525

Constants 527

Index 529