R allows package developers to define their own syntax, resulting in three widely used styles that express the same operations differently. This cheat sheet shows how base R (dollar sign), formula (tilde), and tidyverse (pipe) syntax approach summary statistics, plotting, and data wrangling using the mtcars dataset.

What’s covered#

  • Dollar sign syntax – dataset$variable notation and square bracket subsetting
  • Formula syntax – tilde-based syntax used by lm, lattice, and mosaic
  • Tidyverse syntax – pipe-based syntax using dplyr and ggplot2
  • Summary statistics – one and two variable summaries, categorical and continuous
  • Plotting – histogram, boxplot, scatter plot, bar chart, mosaic plot
  • Data wrangling – subsetting rows and creating new variables
  • Variations within ggplot2 – qplot, ggplot, and ggformula