8.1 Use tbl - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v Voiceover>For years, the gold standard</v> for data manipulation was Hadley Wickham's Plyr Package. Not content to sit around, he eventually wrote an optimized version, mostly in C++, using RCPP, called Dplyr. It's an incredibly fast way to do data manipulation. To start with, we're going to talk about storing data in the special tbl class. Dplyr works just fine in data frames, but storing your object as a tbl makes thing a little easier. So to start with, we will look at the diamonds data. So let's load that up saying data, diamonds package equals gg plot two. This will load the diamonds data, without actually loading the package. We can look at the head of diamonds, and let's check out the class. It's a data frame, standard normal data frame. To work in Dplyr, let's load that package. We'll type in lib, and use the R Studio snippets to make our life a little easier. And now I will say dia gets as dot tbl of diamonds. We can now print dia, we no longer have to worry about calling the head of dia, because Dplyr is smart about how it prints out tbl objects. Now dia, even though it is a tbl, it's also a data frame. Tbls are just extensions of data frames that work a little smarter, so that's why we're going to use it. This step is not necessary when using Dplyr, but it makes things better, so it's highly recommended.