Indeed, you’ll see that at various points in these notes.

Eventually you will start to see cases where it makes sense to trade-off the convenience and coherence of the tidyverse for some features of base or other packages. However, as the tidyverse is a coherent collection of packages, it is often easier to use the tidyverse, especially when you are setting out. Additionally, pretty much everything that you can do in the tidyverse, you can also do with other packages. However, as the tidyverse was built especially for modern data science it is usually easier to use the tidyverse, especially when you are setting out. Pretty much everything that you can do in the tidyverse, you can also do in base. There are three distinctions here: the original R language, typically referred to as ‘base’ the ‘tidyverse’ which is a collection of packages that build on top of the R language and other packages. All packages share an underlying design philosophy, grammar, and data structures’ ( Wickham 2020b). This is ‘… an opinionated collection of R packages designed for data science. The past ten years or so of R have been characterised by the rise of the tidyverse.

Try to make a small example and see if you have the same issues.

Restart R ( Session -> Restart R and Clear Output).

Check the class of your data, by class(data_set$data_column).

Look at the help file for the function by putting ‘?’ before the function e.g.

When you are using R you will run into trouble at some point. You can download R for free here:, and you can download R Studio Desktop for free here. R is an open-source language that is useful for statistical programming. We will come back to everything in this chapter in more detail at some point in these notes.

That way you will see how the various bits fit into context, and hopefully be more motivated to pick up various aspects. Then start to play around with some of the initial case studies. You should initially just go through this chapter quickly, noting aspects that you don’t understand. Some of it may not make sense at first, but these are commands that we will come back to throughout these notes.

How To Charles 3.5.2 For