One of the great things about R is the thousands of packages users have written to solve specific problems in various disciplines -- analyzing everything from weather or financial data to the human genome -- not to mention analyzing computer security-breach data.[ Need to learn R or brush up on basics Download our free Beginner's Guide to R or the Advanced Beginner's Guide to R ]Some tasks are common to almost all users, though, regardless of subject area: data import, data wrangling and data visualization.
The table below show my favorite go-to packages for one of these three tasks (plus a few miscellaneous ones tossed in).
The package names in the table are clickable if you want more information.
To find out more about a package once you've installed it, type help(package = "packagename") in your R console (of course substituting the actual package name ).