Chapter 1 Introduction

Learning objectives:

When we finish this chapter, we will be able to:

• Predict how this book will be useful for us.
• Compare and contrast algorithmic efficiency and programmer productivity.
• Explain why efficiency of R programming might be different from efficiency in other programming languages.
• Describe why efficiency is important.
• Explore general skills to improve efficiency.
• Use benchmarking to measure code speed.
• Use profiling to locate slow code.