// the find
hadley/r4ds
R for data science: a book
Source for R for Data Science (2nd edition), the free online book by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund that teaches the tidyverse approach to importing, tidying, transforming, and visualizing data in R. It's aimed at people learning R for data analysis from scratch or coming from another language and wanting the tidyverse-idiomatic way of doing things.
Built with Quarto so every chapter is executable and the rendered output on r4ds.hadley.nz stays in sync with the source — no stale prose diverging from working code. Covers the full pipeline end to end (import, tidy, transform, visualize, program, communicate) rather than just plotting or just dplyr, which is rare for a single book. Comes with real, slightly messy example datasets (spreadsheets with merged cells, multiple sheets, gapminder-by-year files) instead of only toy data, so the import/cleaning chapters actually teach something.
It's a book, not a package or tool — nothing here to install or depend on, so it doesn't belong next to actual libraries in a 'repo to try' sense. Tightly coupled to the tidyverse's opinions (pipe-heavy, ggplot2, dplyr verbs); readers who need base R or data.table for performance reasons will need a different source. The repo carries a lot of non-text baggage (Omnigraffle files, screenshots, xlsx fixtures, a Keynote file) that's irrelevant if you just want the content — cloning it is heavier than reading it online.