Whenever you're using a for loop, you may want to revise your code to see whether you can use the lapply function instead. Learn all about this intuitive way of applying a function over a list or a vector, and how to use its variants, sapply and vapply.

Loops can come in handy on numerous occasions. While loops are like repeated if statements, the for loop is designed to iterate over all elements in a sequence. Learn about them in this chapter.

Mastering R programming is not only about understanding its programming concepts. Having a solid understanding of a wide range of R functions is also important. This chapter introduces you to many useful functions for data structure manipulation, regular expressions, and working with times and dates.

Functions are an extremely important concept in almost every programming language, and R is no different. Learn what functions are and how to use them—then take charge by writing your own functions.

In this chapter, you'll learn about relational operators for comparing R objects, and logical operators like "and" and "or" for combining TRUE and FALSE values. Then, you'll use this knowledge to build conditional statements.