Chapter 2
Working with Packages
IN THIS CHAPTER
Installing packages
Examining data
Exploring a tidy little universe
A package is a collection of functions and data that augments R. If you’re looking for data to work with, you’ll find many data frames in R packages. If you’re looking for a specialized function that’s not in the basic R installation, you can probably find it in a package.
Installing Packages
As the Packages tab (in the Files/Plots/Packages/Help/Viewer pane of RStudio) shows, many packages come with the basic R installation, but if you want to work with them, you have to install them. This means putting them in a directory called the library. To get one of these comes-with-basic-R packages into the library, you click the Packages tab. Figure 2-1 shows this tab.
Scroll down until you find the package you’re looking for. For this example, I work with the datasets
package.
I click the check box next to datasets
, and this line appears in the Console pane:
> library("datasets", lib.loc="C:/Program Files/R/R-3.4.0/library")
This ...
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