Appendix C — Resources

Base R is the collection of functions that come preloaded with R. A function is a code block that performs a task. Functions that come in R are in-built functions. However, the real power of R (and programming languages more generally) are the large number of user-built functions that are built to perform tasks that can be loaded into base R.

Sets of functions that have a common purpose are bundled together in R in “packages”. There are literally thousands of packages custom-built for R.

During this course, I will ask you to use some important packages for data acquisition, tidying, and visualization. There are two steps to using a package in R.

First, it needs to be installed. Here’s a non-functional example.

install.packages('<PACKAGE.NAME>')

And this example will install an actual package called janitor. This package features a nice import function that fixes column names on import called clean_names().

install.packages('janitor')

In a meta way, you now have used a function to install a package. ‘install.package()’ is an example of an in-built R function.

Once a package is installed, it needs to be loaded. While the installation has put the package on your computer, you need to tell R that it should load these functions for use.

R and other programming languages only do EXACTLY what they are told to do.

Loading a package is accomplished by calling base R library function. Success is indicated with a message like “Attaching package: ‘janitor’

library(janitor)

Attaching package: 'janitor'

The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':

    chisq.test, fisher.test

Libraries have to be loaded each time you restart your R session. The current libraries loaded can be founded in the file manager panel under the Packages tab.

C.0.1 Color Resources

Courtesy of Dalai - a color palette cheatsheet