41 Introduction

In this module, we are going to explore ‘base R.’ This means that we don’t need to load any packages - we’re working with functions that come ‘out of the box,’ as it were. Base is a very stable collection of functions that have been refined over decades. This is in contrast to the tidyverse, which we introduced in earlier modules, which is much newer. Some folks are passionate about the differences between them, but they’re just tools that we use as appropriate. In this module we are going to cover some base functions that you’ll use again and again in your R journey, especially in statistics.

The statistical programming language R was original designed for statistics and so there is a whole lot of functionality built into base R that helps with statistics. For instance, there are great functions to calculate summary statistics, and to quickly plot data. Also in base are the types of foundational programming functions that most languages need, such as for(), while(), and, of course, the ability to define your own function().