From: Wensui Liu I am sorry that I did not state my question clearly. What I mean by data manipulation includes sort, merge, aggregate, transpose,
R has functions for doing those: sort(), merge(), aggregate(), and t(), respectively.
data export and import, format, date & time handle, and so on,
As others have pointed out, R comes with a manual on data import/export. There are articles in the R News that discuss date/time. Not sure what you mean by `format'.
which might be not important to statistician.
I beg to differ: Not too many statisticians (that I know of anyway) have the luxury of having data formatted and served on a silver platter for analysis.
I have use SAS and SPSS for a while and really want to use R as an alternative computing system. Unless R/S+ can provide strong functionality in data manipulation as SAS does, it is hard to compete with SAS in business rather than in academic.
Let's see: I've been working at a pharmaceutical company for over five years now, and I can count the number of times I've used SAS during that period on one hand (and can't recall when was the last time). I do data manipulation all the time (mostly with R). Just last week I wrote a three-line function in R to read and parse a data file that's not in rectangular table format (so read.table and friends can't be used), while a colleague of mine tried to figure out how to do the same with Perl. All the tasks you specified can be done in any number of packages/languages, some easier than others. I'd say R is one of the easiest, but that does require that you gain some familiarity with it. If you have specific questions, try search in the R-help archive, or if you can't find answer there, post the question here. Andy
On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 15:34:06 +0100, Thomas Sch?nhoff <tom_hoary at web.de> wrote:
Hallo, Am Samstag, 12. M?rz 2005 15:08 schrieb Wensui Liu:
In real world, data manipulation might take even longer time and more effort than statistical analysis and modeling. Does anyone know a good book and tutorial about data manupulation? Thank you so much.
Well, it would be much easier to meet your demands if you could give us an idea what you exactly looking for. Anyway, there are some recommendations in R-Manual regarding introduxtory materials on doing statistics in R. If I remember correctly there are also some advices on r-cran.org in the generell FAQ. If you're looking for some introductory stuff doing data
manipulation
in R the book of Peter Dalgaard, Introductory Statistics with R should be taken into consideration. Not long time ago there was a similar question to this list, giving the whole range of available books on statistics in S/R .
Have a look
at http://maths.newcastle.edu.au/~rking/R/, you'll will be overwhelmed. Last but not least, if you look at r-cran website you'll find in contributed section some case-oriented tutorials, i.e. data
mining or
similar stuff! regards Thomas
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http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html -- WenSui Liu, MS MA Senior Decision Support Analyst Division of Health Policy and Clinical Effectiveness ______________________________________________ R-help at stat.math.ethz.ch mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide! http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html