Performing R magic with Jupyter

Jupyter provides quite a few extra features compared to standard Python. Among those features, it provides a framework of extensible commands called magics (actually, this only works with the IPython kernel of Jupyter since it is actually an IPython feature, but that is the one we are concerned with). Magics allow you to extend the language in many useful ways. There are magic functions that you can use to deal with R. As you will see in our example, it makes R interfacing much easier and more declarative. This recipe will not introduce any new R functionalities, but hopefully, it will make it clear how IPython can be an important productivity boost for scientific computing in this regard.

Getting ready

You will need to follow the previous Getting ready steps of the Interfacing with R via rpy2 recipe. The notebook is Chapter01/R_magic.py. The notebook is more complete than the recipe presented here and includes more chart examples. For brevity...