[r] Select first and last row from grouped data

Not dplyr, but it's much more direct using data.table:

library(data.table)
setDT(df)
df[ df[order(id, stopSequence), .I[c(1L,.N)], by=id]$V1 ]
#    id stopId stopSequence
# 1:  1      a            1
# 2:  1      c            3
# 3:  2      b            1
# 4:  2      c            4
# 5:  3      b            1
# 6:  3      a            3

More detailed explanation:

# 1) get row numbers of first/last observations from each group
#    * basically, we sort the table by id/stopSequence, then,
#      grouping by id, name the row numbers of the first/last
#      observations for each id; since this operation produces
#      a data.table
#    * .I is data.table shorthand for the row number
#    * here, to be maximally explicit, I've named the variable V1
#      as row_num to give other readers of my code a clearer
#      understanding of what operation is producing what variable
first_last = df[order(id, stopSequence), .(row_num = .I[c(1L,.N)]), by=id]
idx = first_last$row_num

# 2) extract rows by number
df[idx]

Be sure to check out the Getting Started wiki for getting the data.table basics covered