2 Introduction

As we learnt in the teacheR book, R is supported by thousands of packages that provide extra functionality to the base R experience. One of the most popular sets of packages developed by Hadley Wickham and the RStudio Team is called the tidyverse. The tidyverse is made up of packages designed for data science work that are all underpinned by a common philosophy and a common syntax. At the core of this philosophy is the concept of “tidiness” in data.

The tidyverse is a set of opinionated packages. That means that there’s (usually) a right way to do things with the package, and there’s a wrong way. There’s much debate in the R community as to whether relying heavily on opinionated external packages such as those included in the tidyverse is a good thing. Personally, I think that the packages included in the tidyverse are fantastic, and are a large reason why R is thriving today.

So in this book, we’re a tidyverse family, and we’ll be using the tidyverse packages throughout.