Contents

1. What is does this series offer?
2. What is considered base R?
3. Discuss the article

What is does this series offer?

This is the introduction to the R:case4base series. The aim of the series is to elaborate on very useful features of base R that are lesser known and many times substituted with custom functionality of external packages. The motivation behind the series is to provide useful and easy to read information on the usage of these functionalities from the basic to the advanced topics related to them.

Usually one article in the series will

• contain content on 1 such functionality
• follow a learning system starting from the basics and continuing with more advanced topics, with examples and simple explanations, at the cost of rigorousness
• come with accompanying peace of fully portable R code that can be downloaded and played with no additional setup or packages needed
• come with a few exercises for those wanting to examine the code a bit more
• provide a list of references for further reading
• provide a list of alternatives to the base functionality in no particular order

What is considered base R

The list of packages considered as base can be retrieved with some basic info calling the following:

installed.packages(priority = "base")[, c(2, 3, 6)]
##           LibPath              Version Imports                     
## base      "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" NA                          
## compiler  "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" NA                          
## datasets  "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" NA                          
## graphics  "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" "grDevices"                 
## grDevices "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" NA                          
## grid      "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" "grDevices, utils"          
## methods   "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" "utils, stats"              
## parallel  "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" "tools, compiler"           
## splines   "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" "graphics, stats"           
## stats     "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" "utils, grDevices, graphics"
## stats4    "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" "graphics, methods, stats"  
## tcltk     "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" "utils"                     
## tools     "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" NA                          
## utils     "/usr/lib/R/library" "3.4.3" NA

Discuss the article