I wish you told me earlier about ...

[cboettig]

R packages

• ggplot2 - for awesome plots
• roxygen2 - documenting R code intelligently
• knitr - dynamic documents
• devtools - for making r packages
• RCurl & XML - for mining data from the internet
• snowfall - for parallel R

R commands

[ashander]

@ybrandvain can you add some of your favorite R commands (e.g. the lapply + do.call(rbind,..) workflow) to this thread?

[ashander]

Quoting an email from Carl:

If you're doing computations in R where the size of the data is rate-limiting, (or even not), check out the data.table package. Behaves like a data.frame, but also offers SQL-like operations. It can speed up operations > 100x (while also making the syntax more clean/precise).

Also on my list of things I which I knew about earlier: Hadley's talk on tidy data.