Hadley turned me on to the plyr package and I find myself using it all the time to do 'group by' sort of stuff. But I find myself having to always rename the resulting columns since they default to V1, V2, etc.
Here's an example:
mydata<-data.frame(matrix(rnorm(144, mean=2, sd=2),72,2),c(rep("A",24),rep("B",24),rep("C",24)))
colnames(mydata) <- c("x_value", "acres", "state")
groupAcres <- ddply(mydata, c("state"), function(df)c(sum(df$acres)))
colnames(groupAcres) <- c("state","stateAcres")
Is there a way to make ddply name the resulting column for me so I can omit that last line?