Appendix A — Installation – tidyverse

The chapters of the book focused on data science rely exclusively on the ecosystem of R packages called tidyverse, plus a set of functionality available in any basic R installation without any additional setup needed. All of these packages are so widely used that it’s very easy to install them on practically any machine and any operating system.

Please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me over email at contact [snail sign] bodkan.net if you run into any problems with this setup procedure or anything else related to this! If you’re reading this in preparation for one of my in-person workshops, you can also catch me whenever you see me at the teaching venue.

Installation steps

Note: It will be great if you do this setup on your personal laptop. Getting everything to run locally is often much easier than trying to install things on shared clusters or other HPC environments.

I assume you already have R and RStudio installed on your computer (any version will do).
Open RStudio and copy this into the R console to install the tidyverse packages that we will actually be using in the workshop:

install.packages(c("dplyr", "ggplot2", "readr", "forcats", "cowplot", "palmerpenguins"))

Then, in the same R console, run the following installation command:

install.packages(c("rnaturalearth", "sf"))

This installs two very useful R packages for working with geospatial data.

Note: If you get an error during the installation, please copy-and-paste the entire output from this command and send it to me via email. Or just talk to me in person! The point 2. should work without any issues, but point 3. might require a bit more setup, particularly on Linux or Mac. Don’t worry if things don’t work 100%! Just reach out to me.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re good to go!