R cookbook for the casual dabbler (2nd edition)
2025-04-03
Chapter 1 Introduction
G’day and welcome to R Cookbook for the Casual Dabbler (2nd edition).
RCCD 1st edition was originally published in 2020 as a side project during the COVID-19 pandemic in Melbourne.
As I wrote in the midst of lock down:
I use R a lot for work and for side projects. Over the years I’ve collated a bunch of useful scripts, from macroeconomic analysis to quick hacks for making map legends format properly.
Historically my code has been stored in random Rpubs documents, medium articles, and a bunch of .Rmd files on my hardrive. Occasionally I feel like doing things properly - and upload code to a repository on github.
It doesn’t take a genius to realize this isn’t a very sustainable solution - and it also isn’t very useful for sharing code with others. It turns out 2-years of lock down in Melbourne was enough incentive to sit down and collate my best and most useful code into a single place. In the spirit of open source, a book seemed like the most logical format.
RCCD1e had surprisingly good (and long-lasting reviews). Alas, five-years on, a lot has changed - in both the R community, and the world more broadly. As such, RCCD2e includes significant revisions. The most major of these is a restructure to make the chapters flow more logically. Additionally:
The Australian specific chapters have also been grouped together (e.g. election data and ABS economic indicators).
There are new chapters on functions, packages, as well as more advanced econometric techniques (Bayesian approaches and causal inference).
Worked examples have been updated to reflect best (or at least better) practice.
Many a bug and typo has been fixed.
1.1 Usage
In each chapter I’ve written up the background, methodology and worked example for a separate piece of analysis.
Most of this code will not be extraordinary to the seasoned R aficionado. However I find that in classic Pareto style ~20% of my code contributes to the vast majority of my work output. Having this 20% on hand will hopefully be useful to both myself and others.
1.2 Additional resources
The R community is continually writing new packages and tools. Many of these are covered extensively in various free books available on the bookdown.org website.
The rise of LLM’s over the past 2-years has also made it significantly easier to find, refine, and expand on R code. RCCD2e includes optimized (and better formated) code which has gone through the scrutiny of many of the different LLM’s.
I encourage users to paste in code snippets to language models (or use Cursor) for deeper explanations or alternate examples.