Computerworld’s Sharon Machlis published today a very useful list of R packages that every R user should know. The list covers packages for data import, data wrangling, data visualization and package development, but for beginning R users the biggest challenge is usually just dealing with data. To that end, I thought it was worth listing the package for data access and manipulation, which I thoroughly endorse:

• Data import/access: readr (text data files), rio (many binary data file formats), readxl (Excel spreadsheets), googlesheets (Google Sheets), RMySQL(MySQL databases), quantmod (economic and financial data sources);
• Data manipulation: dplyr (general data frame processing); data.table (aggregation and filtering); tidyr (tidying messy data into row/col format); sqldf (SQL queries on data frames), zoo (time series data wrangling)

Check out Sharon’s complete list below for details on these and many other useful R packages.