Chapter 1 Motivation

POL345 is often Princeton students’ first foray into the programming language R. Through POL345, students gain an introductory overview of R, and programming generally, to conduct basic data analysis on their own. However, many further courses (SML201, SOC306, POL346), along with industry users of R, use the tidyverse instead, a “language” within R to conduct clean, readable data analysis. This book seeks to bridge that gap, revisiting each of the POL345 handouts using the tidyverse to introduce students to this “language within a language”.

For style, I refer to the Tidyverse style guide, referenced at style.tidyverse.org.

This guide is a draft and is intended to be purely informal.