The philosophy behind the previous chapters leading up to this point has been to take a generalized programming approach to data wrangling. A good grasp of the underlying programming techniques involved in manipulating data gives you the ability to tackle non-standard problems in data wrangling when they are encountered.
However, a large number of tasks can be more concisely and elegantly expressed with a language specific to data manipulation. In many cases, the R environment and programming language can allow you to express more with less. On top of that, several packages built on top of R can make the language even more concise and expressive. In this chapter and the next, I will show you how R can be used to take a more formulated approach to data wrangling. This chapter will be an introduction to R with the application...
