Follow the workflow
Welcome
This book is a work in progress. Many parts are more personally addressed to the project I initially wrote this for. I will gradually try to adapt it to the general public so it doesn’t contain out of context mentions.
This book was born as an early attempt to introduce researchers to best coding practices. Many researchers only write code for themselves, and thus don’t feel the urge to cleanly organise and share it. The book has two main aims:
- Work with code collaboratively: use git and GitHub.
- Make your code easily accessible for other programmers: create an R package.
When I started, I didn’t know much about R myself, so writing this was also helpful to me. It started as a rather short introduction (and I still think it is to some extent), but it keeps growing while I learn about new tools that I find useful for our workflow.
I don’t expect you to read everything linearly. You’re encouraged to gradually develop your own package or contribute to an existing one and come back here when you need some help or a refresher. You can also use the search bar at the top left to look for specific keywords and find the relevant parts in the book. Reading code from other experienced programmers can also get you quite far without diving too deep into passively reading texts like this. If that sounds appealing, I recommend checking the source code for R packages from tidyverse or rOpenSci.
This book is prepared with Quarto, but I also used git and R! The book is open source and stored in GitHub. If you find any mistake or some part that can be improved, you can contribute! Look for the Edit this page button, which will take you to GitHub to easily suggest changes.