1.5 The Importance of Being Precise
It’s important to be careful and precise with the commands you type. Small changes in punctuation and spelling can lead to errors of many kinds; some errors you’ll see immediately because your code won’t run, other errors can be more subtle – the code will run but you won’t get the result you intended.
For example:
In this tutorial and the lab assignments we will often be using functions from the tidyverse
packages. This is a set of packages that simplify working with (or wrangling
) data in R. (You can find out more about the tidyverse
here).
To read a csv file into R using tidyverse
, the function is read_csv
To do the same thing in base R, the function is read.csv
. Both work, but they have different functionality, so different arguments, and the object they create from the data once it is read in to R has different properties. So a small change (read_csv
instead of read.csv
) has important consequences.