One of the recent developments in R that I was unaware of until I attended some talks at the Joint Statistical Meetings was the use of dplyr and pipes. It’s an approach to data management that isn’t different from earlier approaches, but the code is much easier to read and maintain. This blog post explains in simple terms how these work and why you would use them.
Sean C. Anderson. dplyr and pipes: the basics. Published on September 13, 2014. Available in html format.