[R] two questions for R beginners

[Allen S. Rout]

Ivan Calandra <ivan.calandra at uni-hamburg.de> writes:

> Related to it, the *apply functions are still a bit difficult to
> understand. When I have to use them, I just try one and see what
> happens. I don't understand them well enough to know which one I
> need.


Ditto.  I have ended up with a small collection of "black magic"
invocations copied from other folks' code, designed to do things like

"I wrote a function to read a file and generate a data frame.  Now I
want to iterate (vectorize) this over many files, and get a much
larger data frame."


This may be one specific case of the larger challenge of "transforming
R data structures".  A somewhat pedantic set of recipes might usefully
be evolved on e.g. the wiki.



- Allen S. Rout