Lesson 4 Packages

Packages are bundles of code which extend the functionality of R.

Anyone can make an R package, and anyone can install anyone else’s R package (if they make it available). This is part of the beauty of open source, and using different R packages is essential to modern R workflows.

You can get packages from many different places, but we’ll focus on just the most common one: CRAN. CRAN is the Comprehensive R Archive Network, a global network of servers which make available for download a set of vetted R packages.

The next section is about importing data, and we’ll be using a package called readr that is specially equipped to import tabular data.