Summary

For bothdata.tableanddplyr/tidyr we went on a very substantial walk-through of the functions and abilities they offer, but not of all of them. Feel free to read the documentation on all of these packages to learn about some of the niceties that we didn’t have the space to mention here.

I hope that you, dear reader, got a lot out of this chapter. Even if you don’t eventually end up using data.table or the tidyverse, I hope you’ve gained a better sense of how flexible R is, learned that R is just as powerful at manipulating data as it is analyzing it, and that we don’t have to settle for base R computation speeds if we don’t want to. Most of the functions we’ve seen in this chapter—in both sections—are a full order of magnitude faster than their base R equivalents. This can be (and often is for very large data sets) the difference between your data wrangling taking a few hours and it taking a few minutes or seconds.