3.2.1. Some tips as we proceed

HOT TIPS THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT!

  1. Develop and save your “cookbooks” for common operations you run into.

  2. Knowing about possible operations, and when and why to use them is more important than memorizing syntax! 1

  3. This chapter contains a lot of informational tables and code snippets; read it at least twice. Once to understand when and why to run a given function, and once to dig into the syntax.

  4. I cover only the most essential functions. Make sure to bookmark (and visit, these pages are very useful!)


1

If you have a firm-year panel with sales, and you want to compute industry competition, knowing that you can run a groupby to reduce a firm-year panel to an industry-year panel is more important than knowing the groupby syntax. You can always look up syntax once you know a function is needed.