Feedback on new book TOC (Table of Contents)

Back in 2017 I wrote the first international¹ edition of my book “Analyzing Financial and Economic Data with R” (online version) . While I was happy with the content of the book at the time of publication, today I know I can make it better. As of early 2019, I’m working in the new edition of the book, taking my time (and weekends!) in fixing all issues, expanding chapters and writing new CRAN packages.

The current TOC is available here. Let me summarize the main changes from the previous edition:

New content with the tidyverse

• Total alignment with the tidyverse. Some base function are presented but priority is for readr, ggplot2, dplyr, stringr, purrr and so on.
• 100+ pages of new content (a 25% overall increase from previous edition).

Teaching Material

• Static end of chapter exercises, with solutions publicly available in the internet;
• Slides for each chapter available in the internet;
• Dynamic 90+ exercises with the exams package. This means you can create and grade randomized unique tests for your students (more on this in a future post);

Book package afedR

• This package makes it easier to import book datasets, copy all content files and reproduce all code in the book. Available in GitHub only.

Three new chapters

• Cleaning and Structuring Financial and Economic Data – How to clean financial and economic data by dealing with long/wide dataframes, outlier detection/removal and desinflating prices and indexes.
• Reporting Results – Using xtable and texreg to report tables and models. Includes a special section on RMarkdown.
• Optimizing Code – Profiling code for bottlenecks and using vectorization, rcpp and memoise to speed up R computations.

Two new packages

• simfinR – grabs data from the SimFin project;
• GetQuandlData– uses Quandl json api and caching for easier and faster data importation;

Right now, I could use some feedback from the community. Have a look in the TOC and let me know what you liked or disliked and if I missed something about using R in finance and economics. You can reach me in my email (marceloperlin@gmail.com) or using the comment section of this post.

My expectation is to finish the book in early 2020. If you want to be notified when I release it, fill up this form and I’ll email you when the book becomes available in Amazon.

This book is a special and life-long project. I plan to keep improving it as long as I can. As for access to the content, I’ll follow the same pricing structure from previous edition: the ebook will sell for 9.99 USD in Amazon, the online version will have the first 6 chapters for free in the internet (see previous edition here.