Chapter 1. Data Types

In this chapter, we provide a broad overview of the different data types available in the R environment. This material is introductory in nature, and this chapter ensures that important information on implementing algorithms is available to you. There are roughly five parts in this chapter:

• Working with variables in the R environment: This section gives you a broad overview of interacting with the R shell, creating variables, deleting variables, saving variables, and loading variables
• Discrete data types: This section gives you an overview of the principle data types used to represent discrete data
• Continuous data types: This section gives you an overview of the principle data types used to represent continuous data
• Introduction to vectors: This section gives you an introduction to vectors and manipulating vectors in R
• Special data types: This section gives you a list of other data types that do not fit in the other categories or have other meanings