Data Analysis with R, Second Edition - Second Edition

Reproducibility and Best Practices

At the close of some programming texts, the user, now knowing the intricacies of the subject of the text, is nevertheless bewildered on how to actually get started with some serious programming. Very often, discussion of the tooling, environment, and the like - the things that inveterate programmers of language x take for granted - are left for the reader to figure out on their own.

Take R, for example: when you click on the R icon on your system, a rather Spartan window with a text-based interface appears, imploring you to enter commands interactively. Are you to program R in this manner? By typing commands one at a time into this window? This was more or less permissible up until this point in the book, ...