My last post I talked about using rCharts to create interactive graphics for my presentation. They seemed to go over pretty well in my interviews and helped me greatly as I did not need to remember or write down specific numbers to talk about. I use slidy to create my HTML slideshows and there was some interest to see exactly how I had these charts into a slidy html presentation.
Recently I decided to switch statistical programs used for the master’s level introductory statistics course I teach here at the University of Arkansas. Historically this course has been taught with SPSS, but I am attempting the switch to R this semester.
My reasons for having students use the gui interface is primarily due to the lack of programming experience. A brief initial poll revealed that only one student had prior programming/code writing experience.
My last post I talked about how I use the data.table package for aggregating and removing duplicate observations. Although I use the data.table package quite often, there are many times when I use plyr (and now the new dplyr) package, primarily because of its easy, intuitive syntax.
Arrange One of my personal favorite functions in the plyr suite of basic functions is the arrange function. The base functions for sorting/ordering are more difficult to use.