Zoom The tidyverse
What is the tidyverse?
The tidyverse is a set of packages which attempts to make R more consistent and more similar to programming languages which were developed by computer scientists rather than statisticians.
You can think of it as a more modern version of R.
The best introduction to the tidyverse is probably the book R for Data Science by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund.
Base R or tidyverse?
“Base R” refers to the use of the standard R library. The expression is often used in contrast to the tidyverse.
There are a many things that you can do with either base R or the tidyverse. Because the syntaxes are quite different, it almost feels like using two different languages and people tend to favour one or the other.
Which one should you use? Well, this is really up to you.
| Base R | Tidyverse |
|---|---|
| Preferred by old-schoolers | Increasingly becoming the norm with newer R users |
| More stable | More consistent syntax and behaviour |
| Doesn’t require installing and loading packages | More and more resources and documentation available |
In truth, even though the tidyverse has many detractors amongst old R users, it is increasingly becoming the norm.
A glimpse of the tidyverse
This introductory workshop is much too short to get into the syntax and usage of the tidyverse, but this series of cheatsheet developed by Posit can give you a bird’s eye view of the tidyverse.
Data transformation
Working with factors
Visualization
Functional programming
