Intro to Packages

Intro to Packages

Packages are collections of functions written by other users. These packages are often catered to solve a particular issue or are run a particular analysis.

For example, there are packages for manipulating spatial data, analyzing phylogenetic history, and interfacing with organizations such as the IUCN.

For any package, we must first install it into R and then we need to load it with library().

You can think of installing the package like buying a book and putting it on your bookshelf.

Loading the package is then pulling the book off the shelf so you can access the information contained within.

To install a package, we just need to use the install.packages() function

 #This is where we get the "book" and put it on our bookshelf.
install.packages("tidyverse")

Then to load the package we just use the library() function

#this is where we get the information from the "book" to use in R
library(tidyverse) 

Once a package is installed on your device, you (usually) will not need to install it again and can just access it with the library() function.

Naturally, it would be impossible to teach a course using all of the different packages available. However, there is one package that in my opinion should be used in nearly every single R project.

That package is tidyverse.

Technically, tidyverse is a package that contains many carefully curated packages. Tidyverse allows all of these packages to communicate with one another seamlessly. You can see all the included packages at tidyverse.org, but here are a few and their uses.

• dplyr – data manipulation
• ggplot2 – visualizations
• stringr – manipulating strings and characters

In Section 3, we introduce tidyverse in detail.