Managing the library of packages
In R, packages play an indispensable role in data analysis and visualization. In fact, R itself is only a tiny core and is built on several basic packages. A package is a container of predefined functions, which are often designed to be general enough to solve a certain range of problems. Using a well-designed package, we don't have to reinvent the wheel again and again, which allows us to focus more on the problem we are trying to solve.
R is powerful not only because of its rich source of packages, but also because of the well-maintained package archive system called The Comprehensive R Archive Network, or CRAN (http://cran.r-project.org/). The source code of R and thousands of packages is archived in this system. ...
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