The six verbs

Six words do most of the work. You can keep rows, choose columns, add a column, summarize by group, sort, and take the first few. Almost everything people actually do to a table is some arrangement of those six.

This part introduces them one at a time, and every chapter is short on purpose. By the end of it you can answer real questions, and the rest of the book is the same six verbs with more to say inside them.

If you have used dplyr, you already know five of these under other names. If you have used pandas or SQL, you know all six as several different spellings each, and the point of this part is that here there is one spelling.