March 2015
Intermediate to advanced
202 pages
4h 23m
English
Content preview from R Packages
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Chapter 4. Package Metadata
The job of the DESCRIPTION file is to store important metadata about your package. When you first start writing packages, you’ll just use this metadata to record what packages are needed to run your package. However, as time goes by and you start sharing your package with others, the metadata file becomes increasingly important because it specifies who can use it (the license) and whom to contact (you!) if there are any problems.
Every package must have a DESCRIPTION. In fact, it’s the defining feature of a package (RStudio and devtools consider any directory containing DESCRIPTION to be a package). To get you started, devtools::create("mypackage") automatically adds a bare-bones description file. This allows you to start writing the package without having to worry about the metadata until you need to. The minimal description will vary a bit depending on your settings, but should look something like this:
Package: mypackage
Title: What The Package Does (one line, title case required)
Version: 0.1
Authors@R: person("First", "Last", email = "first.last@example.com",
role = c("aut", "cre"))
Description: What the package does (one paragraph)
Depends: R (>= 3.1.0)
License: What license is it under?
LazyData: true
(If you’re writing a lot of packages, you can set global options via devtools.desc.author, devtools.desc.license, devtools.desc.suggests, and devtools.desc. See package?devtools for more details.)
DESCRIPTION uses a simple file format called the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.