The R language provides a rich environment for working with data, especially data to be used for statistical modeling or graphics. Coupled with the large variety of easily available packages, it allows access to both well-established and experimental statistical techniques. However techniques that might make sense in other languages are often very inefficient in R, but, due to R’s flexibility, it is often possible to implement these techniques in R. Generally, the problem with such techniques is that they do not scale properly; that is, as the problem size grows, the methods slow down at a rate that might be unexpected. The goal of this book is to present a wide variety of data manipulation techniques implemented in R to take advantage of the way that R works, rather than directly resembling methods used in other languages.