# collapse Documentation and Resources

#### Sebastian Krantz

#### 2022-02-11

collapse is a C/C++ based package for data transformation and statistical computing in R. It’s aims are:

1. To facilitate complex data transformation, exploration and computing tasks in R.
2. To help make R code fast, flexible, parsimonious and programmer friendly.

Documentation comes in 4 different forms:

## Built-In Structured Documentation

After installing collapse, you can call `help("collapse-documentation")` which will produce a central help page providing a broad overview of the entire functionality of the package, including direct links to all function documentation pages and links to 13 further topical documentation pages describing how clusters of related functions work together. The names of these additional help pages are contained in a global macro `.COLLAPSE_TOPICS` and can so easily be called from the R console as well. Function documentation is interlinked with the relevant topical pages, and all documentation pages link back to the central overview page at `help("collapse-documentation")`.

Thus collapse comes with a fully structured hierarchical documentation which you can browse within R - and that provides everything necessary to fully understand the package. The Documentation is also available online.

The package page under `help("collapse-package")` additionally provides some more general information about the package and its design philosophy, as well as a very compact set of examples covering important functionality (which lack features introduced in 1.7 though).

Reading `help("collapse-package")` and `help("collapse-documentation")` and working through the examples on `help("collapse-package")` is the fastest way to get acquainted with the package. `help("collapse-documentation")` is also the most up-to-date documentation of the package at the time of releasing 1.7 (January 2022).

## Vignettes

There are also 5 vignettes which are available online (due to their size and the enhanced browsing experience on the website). The vignettes are:

- Introduction to collapse : Introduces all main features in a structured way

- collapse and dplyr : Demonstrates the integration of collapse with dplyr / tidyverse workflows and associated performance improvements

- collapse and plm: Demonstrates the integration of collapse with plm and shows examples of efficient programming with panel data

- collapse and data.table: Shows how collapse and data.table may be used together in a harmonious way

- collapse and sf: Shows how collapse can be used to efficiently manipulate sf data frames

Note that these vignettes currently (January 2022) do not cover features introduced in version 1.7. They have been updated if you see a 2022 in the date of the vignette.

## Blog

I maintain a blog linked to Rbloggers.com where I introduced collapse with some compact posts covering central functionality. Among these, the post about programming with collapse is highly recommended for ambitious users and developers willing to build on collapse, as it exposes to some degree how central parts of collapse work together and provides tips on how to write very efficient collapse code. Future blog posts will expose some specialized functionality in more detail.

## Cheatsheet

Finally, there is a cheatsheet at Rstudio that compactly summarizes the collapse function space, similar to `help("collapse-documentation")`. This one will be updated shortly.