Week 8 Info: Functions and Iteration and Project Proposals
Hello Class,
Today is the start of week 8, where we will learn several more sophisticated programming concepts in R which will enable you to write cleaner, more concise, and more understandable code and to also accomplish more complex programming tasks than previously. The key topics will be functions (Chapter 25); which allow you to re-use and re-factor code by aggregating chunks of code that perform specific functions into function definitions, iteration (Chapter 26); which allows you to perform the same operation on many different objects simultaneously, and important base R functions (Chapter 27); which will round out your R knowledge. Chapter 26 will introduce you to a programming paradigm known as functional programming, which has distinctive strengths and weaknesses compared to object oriented and imperative programming and is likely to be less familiar to most of you.
There will be no lab assignment this week, but you will need to complete a short (~2 page) project proposal by next Sunday: Project Proposal.
For your reading assignments and more details about this week, head over to Module 8. Though we have no lab assignment this week, we will work the concepts of this week into future assignments and they are important for your success as an R programmer.