User Guide

The R Package ‘learnrbook’

This package contains data sets used in the code examples in the book “Learn R: As a Language” by Pedro J. Aphalo (2020), available directly from the publisher and through booksellers. The book uses mostly data sets included in the R distribution itself and in packages available through CRAN, so few additional data sets are included as R data in this package. However, to demonstrate the reading of foreign data formats I use in the book several files. These files are part of this package and installed in the extdata folder.

Installation of the package

Installation of the package itself is not different to that of any other package available through CRAN.

install.packages("learnrbook")

Loading the package

library(learnrbook)

Installation of other packages used in the book

In the code examples in the book I use several packages available from CRAN. They are loaded in a code chunk at the start of chapters 6, 7, and 8, where they are used. To facilitate their installation and use, vectors containing package names are provided.

To install all the packages used in the book you can use.

install.packages(learnrbook::pkgs_all)

If you rather install only the packages used in a given chapter, for example, chapter 7 on the Grammar of Graphics it is possible to install only these.

install.packages(learnrbook::pkgs_ch_graphics)

To install only the packages that are missing.

intalled_pkgs <- installed.packages()[ , 1]
missing_pkgs <- setdiff(learnrbook::pkgs_all, intalled_pkgs)
if (length(missing_pkgs) > 0) {
 install.packages(missing_pkgs)
}

Use of R data objects

Please, see the individual help pages for additional details on the data sets.

help(package = "learnrbook")

data(package = "learnrbook")

Display the top six rows.

head(viikki_d29.dat)

##            solar_time WindDir_D1_WVT WindSpd_S_WVT
## 1 2016-07-29 00:00:27         64.680         0.767
## 2 2016-07-29 00:01:27         22.660         0.733
## 3 2016-07-29 00:02:27          7.946         1.142
## 4 2016-07-29 00:03:27         19.320         1.333
## 5 2016-07-29 00:04:27        348.700         1.033
## 6 2016-07-29 00:05:27        323.000         0.967

Use of examples files

Example files are installed in folder extdata under the root folder of the installed package. The location and path to where a package is installed is dependent on the operating system and account settings, and on the settings in the .Rprofile file. However, R provides a simple way of finding the path to this folder.

system.file("extdata", package = "learnrbook")

We can also easily get a list of the available example files.

path2examples <- system.file("extdata", package = "learnrbook")
list.files(path2examples)

##  [1] "BIRCH1.SYS"                   "Book1.ods"                   
##  [3] "Book1.xlsx"                   "GPSDATA-large.gpx"           
##  [5] "GPSDATA.gpx"                  "aligned-ASCII-UK.csv"        
##  [7] "aligned-ASCII.fwf"            "aligned-ASCII.txt"           
##  [9] "areatable.dat"                "cloudindex.idx"              
## [11] "dwtable.dat"                  "logger_1.txt"                
## [13] "meteo-data.nc"                "miss-aligned-ASCII-shift.txt"
## [15] "miss-aligned-ASCII.txt"       "my-data.sav"                 
## [17] "my-data.xlsx"                 "my-file.csv"                 
## [19] "my-file1.csv"                 "my-file2.csv"                
## [21] "my-file2.txt"                 "my-file3.txt"                
## [23] "my-file4.txt"                 "my-file5.tsv"                
## [25] "my-file5.txt"                 "my-file6.csv"                
## [27] "my-file7.txt"                 "my-script.R"                 
## [29] "not-aligned-ASCII-UK.csv"     "not-aligned-ASCII.txt"       
## [31] "pet_ltm.nc"                   "pevpr.sfc.mon.ltm.nc"        
## [33] "rcatsidx.idx"                 "rindex.idx"                  
## [35] "thiamin.sav"                  "using-r-main-crc.idx"

The formats of these files are:

Most data files are used in Chapter 8 Data Input and Output.

The example R script is used in Chapter 3 The R language: “Paragraphs” and “essays”

The sources of the data in these files, and a short descriptions of the data follows for those files that contain real data.

R code for code chunks in the book

The code examples from the book, extracted with knitr::purl() are included in this package in file purl-output.zip. The code from chunks in the book are in one .R file per chapter. The code below extracts and saves these files in a new directory called purl-output under the directory passed as argument to exdir. Here we use ~ to select the home directory of the current user:

zip.file <- system.file("example-chunks/purl-output.zip", package = "learnrbook")
unzip(zip.file, exdir = "~")

Alternatively the whole .zip file can be copied:

file.copy(from = zip.file, to = "~")

The book “Learn R: As a Language”

Book front cover