Chapter 2 Get Started with tidyverse

2.1 The R Language

The R language is an extremely popular scripting language used by millions of people around the world. Primarily, it’s used for data analysis, modeling, and visualization. Many people think of R as statistical software, but it’s fundamentally not and it’s a little bit upsetting when people say that. R is programming language that has been adopted and curated by people interested in doing data science as flexibly as possible.

R lives and breathes at the comprehensive R archive network, abbreviated to CRAN. When you download R from CRAN, you’ve actually installed Base-R. Base-R includes all of the necessary machinery for your computer to be able to run R code. It also installs standard R packages like stats, utils and graphics. These packages allow you to start using R immediately on your machine. In order for data manipulation, using Base R is sufficient most of the time. The Base R way of doing things involves a code that looks very much like this;

head(iris[iris$Species == "virginica",])

##     Sepal.Length Sepal.Width Petal.Length Petal.Width   Species
## 101          6.3         3.3          6.0         2.5 virginica
## 102          5.8         2.7          5.1         1.9 virginica
## 103          7.1         3.0          5.9         2.1 virginica
## 104          6.3         2.9          5.6         1.8 virginica
## 105          6.5         3.0          5.8         2.2 virginica
## 106          7.6         3.0          6.6         2.1 virginica

First to access to ‘species’ column and then we have a double equals to say ‘species’ is equivalent to ‘virginica’ and then we have a comma to say we want all of the columns and then the final closing square bracket.

2.2 R Packages

It’s possible to do every single thing you could possibly imagine with Base-R because it is a true and complete programming language but you would have to write a lot of code yourself. Most people jump straight into using R packages to make their life easier and more reproducible, so what are R packages? R packages are self-contained collections of functions and/or datasets that provide us with the ability to do any number of things from analyzing data, visualizing data to potentially even generating reports with R which is what R Markdown allows us to do. Now, CRAN has over 10,000 packages and this comprehensive range of packages available from CRAN is part of what makes R such a popular scripting language.

It’s a fact of programming and scripting but building everything yourself from scratch is time consuming and more than likely, hugely error prone, this is why R users depend on packages. Using packages makes it easier to start working on a new project in R. Packages can make collaborating with others on R projects easier, as you can be ensured everyone is using the same code base.