R Packages: Organize, Test, Document, and Share Your Code

Hadley Wickham

March 26, 2015

R Packages: Organize, Test, Document, and Share Your Code by Hadley Wickham is an essential book for R programmers and Data Scientists who wish to improve the level of organization, quality, and reproducibility of their code. The book provides a comprehensive guide to the process of creating and maintaining new packages, from planning and writing, to documenting and testing, to finally releasing them on CRAN. To begin, the book covers the basics, focusing heavily on Project Structuring, Version Control, and Code Discipline. This part covers how to start a project, how to structure your codebase, and how to practice good code quality and version control practices.The book then moves on to the more advanced topics of Writing and Documenting by providing an in-depth look at Roxygen and its features, such as documentation generation, testing, and other organizational tools. Wickham then takes a detailed look at the automation of package building, covering topics such as Unit testing and Continuous integration to ensure that code is automatically tested and released, freeing the coder from manually running checks.Finally, the book looks at Releasing and Maintaining packages by looking at the process of releasing code to CRAN, as well as more advanced topics such as Creating patches, Maintaining a package’s reputation, and Source code management.Wickham’s R Packages provides readers with all the tools they need to reliably and successfully maintain and distribute their code. With clear, concise explanations and powerful organization and automation tools, it promises to be an indispensible resource to everyone who writes code.